The Last Bridge Is Home

The Last Bridge Is Home resonates with familial love and compassion of place. Rodd Whelpley dives into what is often unsaid but still heard, through music, through undertones of conversation. He builds for us a bridge to tandem our love and grief, what we remember and how we move forward. This collection is a testament to inevitable change, moments when “you look down, unsure the water will still be there” and find your strength. Whelpley holds out a hand and offers us an intimate lens of late 1970s Ohio, of family, and ultimately of how our relationships sustain us.

—Madeleine Corley, Managing Editor, Barren Magazine

In The Last Bridge Is Home, Rodd Whelpley gives us an intimate portrait of changing and complicated family relationships: how they bubble up, transform us, and never fully leave us. The poems dance in and out of childhood, adult, and familial fears and pains, tracing a life in a way that shows just how present memory, forgetting, and loss can be.

—Bess Cooley, Winner of the 2017 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, Co-Founder and Editor of Peatsmoke

The beauty of Rodd Whelpley’s writing makes me want to sit with his poems. Their resonance makes me want to understand why they touch me. Their brevity fools me into thinking that they are simple, and then I embark on an experience that becomes more layered with each read. For Whelpley, it is in our nature to cling, to grieve, and, for whatever reason, we resist the calm. Our world is both immediate and distant. We drift and we land. We commune, and then we are other. We perceive both beauty and fury and remain powerless in the face of each.

—Ariana D. Den Bleyker, Publisher, ELJ Editions, Ltd.