winner of the Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal
available now
The collection, chosen by the editors, traces a powerful intellectual journey in the aftermath of loss. Co-editor Melissa Crowe writes, “Gosnay’s wide-ranging and incisive imagination draws from realms as varied as mythology, astronomy, and epistemology to dramatize the efforts of a sharp and hungry mind to cope with grief. In so doing, she offers up a vivid, wise, and innovative chapbook that provides immediate readerly pleasures and rewards our finest attention.”
In The Wanderer, Christine Gosnay writes, “The beginning of the marriage? Oh yes. / A bitter cold day, in a public park. No swans. / I was the only woman there.” The first time I read those lines, I recognized the voice of the wanderer as the voice of our collective, internal exile from America. I was shocked by the strength of that recognition. I hadn’t known, before I read these poems, that I had no words to speak my exile. Gosnay gave me words.
- Shane McCrae
One of the greater pleasures in poetry is feeling the presence of desire
in a calm statement. I feel this pleasure over and over reading Christine
Gosnay’s The Wanderer, in which mysterious forces are moving outdoors,
the darkness breathes like an empty cathedral, and “There isn’t a way to
stop a wave / without making another / wave.”
- Jordan Davis
Christine Gosnay 