“Chelsea Wagenaar’s gorgeous new collection, The Spinning Place, examines the body’s gifts and fragilities alongside language’s failure to give a name to our singular experiences. Full of delivery room sacraments, lullabies, bedtime rituals, and stories too true to finish, these poems intimate familial connection and the way words are perhaps not necessary—how sound without meaning can draw someone closer. Wagenaar revives experiences I know but makes language new again, transforming nouns into verbs and giving the body ways to speak, ways for hands to measure the height of sorrow, ways for wounds to have breath enough to sing.”
—Traci Brimhall

“Chelsea Wagenaar’s The Spinning Place excavates an essential question of poetry: How do we express the ineffable? ‘How do we live / what we cannot say?’ What is the word for ‘alluvial silt of tea still warm in the porcelain’? Her high music permeates this collection from everyday objects to the close-mortal, where she collapses battles, stadiums, and classrooms in a wonderfully disjunctive thrall: ‘They absolve midterm dates, / cancel Gettysburg, erode the ribs / of the human skeleton. / They unstack the kindling / of the music staff, halve the half notes, / unconjugate cantar.’ Wagenaar’s ‘primal chorus’ of witness brings poetry back to what matters.”
—Mark Irwin