Big news here in the last few weeks: Counterpoint Press recently bought my memoir-in-fragments The Mountain, the Fathers for publication in spring of 2012. I’m delighted to be working with the folks at Counterpoint and to be joining a catalog that features writers such as Wendell Berry, Debra Marquart, Larry Woiwode, John Daniel, Gary Snyder, and many more.
News
Top Ten List
My top ten list, “Ten Very Fine Neo-Westerns,” is up at Dzanc Books. My poetry collection Killing the Murnion Dogs is forthcoming this August from Black Lawrence Press, which is a Dzanc imprint.
Poem up at Linebreak
My poem “Mission School, 1922: What She Remembered” is the featured poem this week at Linebreak, one of the most interesting online literary journals out there. From the website:
ORIGINAL POETRY, UPDATED WEEKLY
Linebreak is a weekly magazine with a bias for good poetry. We look for poems that we wish we had written, poems that take us somewhere we didn’t even know we wanted to go.
Two Weeks
My poem “Letter to My Son Concerning Our First Night of Birthing Class” is included in Linebreak’s fascinating new project, Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. You can buy the book (and listen to a reading of my poem!) via the link above.
Here’s a bit more about the project from the website:
Two Weeks is a new anthology of contemporary poetry, released exclusively in ebook format. The book was compiled, edited, designed, coded, and published in exactly 14 days.
Our purpose was to test how quickly a book of poetry could be crafted given new technologies, and to prove that neither speed nor technical limitations need diminish editorial standards or strip essential formatting. We hope you enjoy the result.
New poems from Bruce Bond, Geoffrey Brock, Dorianne Laux, Seth Abramson, T.R. Hummer, Oliver de la Paz, Joe Wilkins, Hannah Miet, Jazzy Danziger, Randall Mann, Jeffery Bahr, Matthew Henriksen, Mary Meriam, Amanda Auchter, Ernest Hilbert, Matthew Zapruder, Brian Spears, Rachel Richardson, Christina Stoddard, Kimberly Grey, David Roderick, Josh Kalscheur, Kerry Krouse, Benjamin Glass, Rose Hunter, Lauren Camp, Jon Tribble, Patricia Lockwood, and more …
Portfolio of Poems at Escape Into Life
The online arts magazine Escape Into Life has just published a portfolio of my poems, all of which will be in my upcoming book Killing the Murnion Dogs.
Two Poems at Mayday
I’m delighted to see my poems “Six Days’ Lament” and “Each Word Holds the World” up at Mayday, an online magazine of art, literature, and commentary.
Reading in Madison
The folks at Devil’s Lake have invited me and nonfiction writer Caryl Pagel to read at the launch party for their winter issue this Friday evening in Madison, Wisconsin. I’m very much looking forward to it!
Killing the Murnion Dogs
Killing the Murnion Dogs, my first full-length book of poems, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in August of this year. We’ve been working on the cover, and I’ve pasted the final below, along with some advanced reviews:
“Joe Wilkins has a big, true, highway-running American voice. He remains one of my favorite young poets working today. When you see a new book of his, you should celebrate. Like this one. Just buy it, put down the window, and let the music blow back your hair. It’s nothing but alive.”
–Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway and The Fever of Being
“In Killing the Murnion Dogs, the old lonelinesses, bodied forth by whisky in jam jars and rotting porches, highways, wolves, the dream of escape, are reinhabited and updated by Joe Wilkins’ own urgent interrogations – most notably: where is home, and why is memory so heartbreakingly incomplete? 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, author of On Looking and King Baby
Not many poets address the American “interior” with the skill and insight Joe Wilkins displays in Killing the Murnion Dogs. I mean interior in both senses: Wilkins does a wonderful job evoking hardscrabble landscapes of Montana buttes and Mississippi cotton fields, sunflowers and coyotes, okra casseroles and rust-gutted Chevies. But his deeper subject is the lives of the farmers and ranchers who inhabit that land, lives he illuminates with gritty authority and boundless compassion. This is a first book wise beyond its years.
–Campbell McGrath, author of Spring Comes to Chicago and The Florida Poems
“These poems examine what and how we perceive and remember, the source, substance, and journey of our time on this earth. My favorite poem in the collection may be “Outside a Liquor Store in South Memphis” which is lush, vivid, itchy and full of white space. I’m grateful for the pulse and heat of all of these poems, and to Joe Wilkins for providing the language, nerve, heart and invitation to go with him, from the opening rain spell to the last lines of the final poem, “Prayer”: ‘Oh this dust/ here is the good north pasture and this dust here is home.'”
–Rebecca Wee, author of Uncertain Grace
Poem up at Devil’s Lake
My poem “Radio All-Night Special AM” is up at the wonderful new online literary magazine out of Madison, Wisconsin, Devil’s Lake. Lots of other good stuff there too, including poems by Brent Goodman and Dean Young.
Best American Magazine Writing 2010
The Best American Magazine Writing 2010 is out! Along with work by Fareed Zakaria, Mitch Albom, and Wells Tower, the anthology features my essay “Out West.”
joewilkins.org 
