Author: joe.robert.wilkins

I’ll be taking When We Were Birds on the road in the next few days and weeks. You can find the run down below. Love to see you, if it works out!

• Wednesday, April 13: University of Idaho Alumni Reading, Moscow, ID, with Steve Coughlin and Lindsay Wilson
• Thursday, April 14: Pie & Whiskey Reading, Get Lit, Spokane, WA, with Kate Lebo, Sam Ligon, M.L. Smoker, Jess Walter, Elissa Washuta, and others
• Friday, April 15: Poets of the Northwest, Get Lit, Spokane, WA, with M.L. Smoker and Kathryn Smith
• Saturday, April 16: Layers of Landscape: Harnessing the Power of Place, Get Lit, Spokane, WA
• Monday, April 18: Wenatchee Valley College Visiting Writers Series, Wenatchee, WA, with Steve Coughlin and Anna Maria Spagna
• Wednesday, April 20: Book Launch with Mountain Writers Series at Vie de Boheme, Portland, OR
• Friday, April 22: Grass Roots Books & Music, Corvallis, OR
• Sunday, April 24: National Poetry Month Reading at Powell’s on Hawthorne, Portland, OR, with A.M. O’Malley and Kim Dower
• Thursday, April 28: Another Read Through, Portland, OR, with A. Molotkov and Jeff Alessandrelli

Two poems, one from the new book, When We Were Birds, up today at Terrain, one of the best online journals out there!

It’s the official publication day for my third full-length collection of poetry, When We Were Birds. I’m damn proud of this one, and so pleased Billy Collins picked it out of the pile for the University of Arkansas Press. Here’s the book description from the publisher:

In When We Were Birds, Joe Wilkins wrests his attention away from the griefs, deprivations, and high prairies of his Montana childhood and turns toward “the bean-rusted fields & gutted factories of the Midwest,” toward ordinary injustice and everyday sadness, toward the imminent birth of his son and his own confusions in taking up the mantle of fatherhood, toward faith and grace, legacy and luck.

A panoply of voices are at play—the escaped convict, the late-night convenience store clerk, and the drowned child all have their say—and as this motley chorus rises and crests, we begin to understand something of what binds us and makes us human: while the world invariably breaks all our hearts, Wilkins insists that is the very “place / hope lives, in the breaking.”

Within a notable range of form, concern, and voice, the poems here never fail to sing. Whether praiseful or interrogating, When We Were Birds is a book of flight, light, and song. “When we were birds,” Wilkins begins, “we veered & wheeled, we flapped & looped— / it’s true, we flew.”

The Iowa Review just posted this wise, wide-ranging review-essay on the literature of the American West, with a special focus on my work, including Far Enough, The Mountain and the Fathers, and Killing the Murnion Dogs.

Jazzed to have a new poem up at the always wonderful Linebreak! This one’s an Oregon poem, one of the first.