The other night you woke me to ask who was ringing our doorbell.We don’t have a doorbell, I replied, and in this waydidn’t answer your question. (How to love you enoughto speak to your dreams?) Once in a strange fluorescent bathroomwe ate chicken wings over double sinks. Just you and me and what the mirrorsaid about us: I wore a white blouse,you bowed your head for each bite. (No—the questionis not one of enough.) I wish for us to love without context, and afterward to coolin the dark like a modest rubble of pale, brittle bones.To open the door and tell the mysterious guestin the white blouse, her finger on the faint bell,From now on, just walk in.
Anniversary
To love purely is to consent to distance. —Simone Weil
Feature Date
- July 17, 2020
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Copyright © 2019 by Chelsea Wagenaar
Southern Indiana Review Press
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently The Spinning Place, winner of the 2018 Michael Waters Prize. Her first collection, Mercy Spurs the Bone, was selected by Philip Levine to win the 2013 Philip Levine Prize. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of North Texas, and currently lives in Indiana with her husband, the poet Mark Wagenaar, and their two children. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Image and The Cincinnati Review.
Evansville, Indiana
University of Southern Indiana
“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
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