Diane Seuss commends Mark Wunderlich’s latest collection, God of Nothingness (Graywolf Press) as “erotic, folkloric, elegiac, philosophic, aesthetic, lyric, queer and rural and utterly haunted (but without the usual messiness of haunting.)” Rooted in queer memory and desire, Wunderlich’s precise explorations of grief and the divine appraise the body, both human and animal, and the metaphysical, from weaving in heaven-letters to the supernatural quality in memory. Reflecting on the penultimate poem in the collection, “Midsummer,” Robin Gow considers, “‘Alive’ is the agent that gives the ‘nothing’ of ‘death’ meaning and animates these memories and ghosts. In the end, the collection becomes one about welcoming ghosts, permitting grief and loneliness, and venerating queer life and loves.”
Recipient of a multitude of fellowships including a 2021 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Mark Wunderlich is the Executive Director and Literature Faculty at Bennington College. He received his BA in German Literature and English from the University of Wisconsin and his MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts Writing Division. His previous collections include The Anchorage (the University of Massachusetts Press), which received the Lambda Literary Award, Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf Press), and The Earth Avails (Graywolf Press), which received the 2015 Rilke Prize and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award.
Featured works by Mark Wunderlich:
The God of Nothingness
Coyote, with Mange
Wunderlich
