Shadowgraph

"A scrupulous, beautiful vocabulary showcases the poet's skill and depth...A talented poet with a relish for nature and the human experience..." — Booklife


Although the poems in John C. Wunsch’s Shadowgraph are unapologetically earthbound creatures, there is something of the cosmic in his gritty pastorals and cityscapes. Here in these pages, “crows scavenge for subatomic / particles; a fox hunts down its gravitational force,” and “planets [are] hung out to dry on a clothesline.” We follow the poet’s voice as he guides us through each season of the late apocalypse, set in the American Midwest. Even when the backroad, corn-country landscapes he paints for us are as bleak as the airless dark between stars, his language is always lush and bursting with life. With an eye for the overlooked detail and an ear for the music between words, Wunsch’s poems are “a meshwork of stars skin and bone,” their “threads stitched as closely as nerves.” You won’t be able to tell where the terrestrial ends and the otherworldly begins.