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About the Author
Born and raised in Seattle, Joshua Marie Wilkinson is author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (Iowa, 2006), and Figures for a Darkroom Voice (with Noah Eli Gordon and Noah Saterstrom: Tarpaulin Sky, 2007). He is also co-editor, with Christina Mengert, of 12×12: Conversations in 21st Century Poetry & Poetics (Iowa, 2009). After stints in Spain, Turkey, Slovakia, Arizona, Ireland, and Colorado, he has settled in Illinois where he teaches at Loyola University Chicago.
Advanced Praise
“The poems of Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s fourth collection lure, hypnotize, and stun. Wilkinson beckons us to slip out of the mundane acts of day-to-day life and into a world devoid of boundaries and temporal continuity. Memory collides with fantasy to yield a series of prose and lyrical fragments described by Graham Foust as being ‘equal parts flashed-forward backstory and passing sad daydream.’ A pervasive, uncanny awareness of self tumbles through the book as the speaker reveals his knowledge of intimate details. Such is the case in ‘sleeping & arriving alike’ where the speaker declares, ‘I know the name of what you used to wish to become. I know the sounds you make sleeping & arriving alike.’ This collection is rife with similarly unsettling insights, and ultimately, we emerge from Wilkinson’s cinema of curiosa refreshingly disturbed and ready to question our routine acts both as performers and as voyeurs.” –American Poet, magazine of the Academy of American Poets
“…Wilkinson has honed his craft to the point that he is now cutting, editing, and hand-painting the brief frames of his poems not before the screening, but as the reel is spinning. The transitions are sudden, dramatic, and yet in Wilkinson’s hands they occur with a seamlessness that is eerie, not so much like dreaming as they are like sleepwalking (a theme that recurs throughout his work) — the unsettling and yet strangely enlightening experience of waking up again and again in a strange place without knowledge of how one got there but knowing all too well that the body or the guide has motives and motions of its own.” –Michael McLane, Sugar House Review
“Equal parts flashed-forward backstory and passing sad daydream, The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth helps us and hips us to the circus of public secrets. I trust this book as far as it can throw me.”—Graham Foust
“Reading this collection is like trying on someone else’s dreams. Or getting secret, elliptical messages from the books that you read, and loved, in childhood. Strangely satisfying, and satisfyingly strange—I’m a fan.”—Kelly Link
Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-67-5