Praise:
“Joe Wilkins has a big, true, highway‑running American voice. When you see a new book of his, you should celebrate. Just buy it, put down the window, and let the music blow back your hair. It’s nothing but alive.” -Luis Alberto Urrea
“Joe Wilkins writes his truths straight from the broken heart of a broken land. When I read his personal stories, so lyrically and wondrously imagined, I feel a beautiful and sometimes terrifying emotion rise up in me–mythic, redemptive, and sustaining. If you want to read what matters, read this.” -Kim Barnes
“Tending the spirits of Richard Hugo and James Wright, master chroniclers of sad towns and desperate cities, these patient, vulnerable, angry and unapologetically Romantic poems are helplessly tender toward ruin, and full of stubborn belief in the beauty that can be coaxed from desolation.” -Lia Purpura
“Joe Wilkins grew up hard in the middle of nowhere—the bent-back, make-do world of the driest, loneliest country in all Montana—and after reading this memoir about the West, about myth, about manhood, about grief and transcendence, I felt at once heartbroken and hopeful and ultimately awed by his ability to twist sentences like barbed wire, his voice wondrously rich with dirt-and-gravel poetry.” -Benjamin Percy
“One way to define love is fidelity to experience, and if this is so, then Wilkins demonstrates such love over and over in his ruthless, entirely unsentimental efforts to imagine and understand the world he inhabits—and the one that inhabits him.” -Sam Green
“Not many poets address the American interior with the skill and insight Joe Wilkins displays in Killing the Murnion Dogs. This is a first book wise beyond its years.” -Campbell McGrath
“Joe Wilkins’ sketches of life in Montana’s Big Dry country, north of Billings and halfway to nowhere, are filled with a potent combination of loving poetry and bitter nostalgia. You can smell the sage and wild onions and feel how this land apart forms and twists those who live there, and sometimes kills them. The Big Dry may care nothing for pilgrims and father seekers, but it marks its own as surely as a father marks a son.” -John N. Maclean
“The Mountain and The Fathers is vivid and compelling. We’re reading it in Montana in order to understand ourselves. And for the pure pleasure we find in the storytelling.” -William Kittredge
“These poems examine what and how we perceive and remember, the source, substance, and journey of our time on this earth.” -Rebecca Wee
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