Description

Winner of the 2024 James Baker Hall Book Award for Poetry by an emerging poet (Judged by Greg Pape), Wesley Houp’s first book received exhilarating receptions on the Kentucky Writers on the Road speaker’s tour. Houp finds poems everywhere, in some very unlikely places.

T. Crunk wrote of the work:

“W. Houp is a Revelator.  He seems to know instinctually that poems are not an “expressing,” or even primarily a “creating,” but foremost an in-seeing, a result of attending so intently to the objects and experiences of the world, in all their urgent, opaque materiality, that they finally open to reveal the luminous and illuminating hidden in them.  Every poem in this robust collection achieves this, their sparse, refreshing clarity bespeaking an eye and mind and art that will settle for nothing less, or more, than the vital and vitally essential, which reveals itself, and which the poet so profoundly captures in poem after poem, with the frequently excruciating quietude and grace of the sacred – all the more sacred for the very mundanity of the objects and moments so lovingly, humbly, and artfully retrieved, preserved, and gifted to the reader, who can only appropriately respond with wonder and gratitude for the revelation.”