Chelsea Wagenaar

Chelsea Wagenaar received her B.A. from the University of Virginia and is currently a doctoral fellow at the University of North Texas. She lives in Denton, Texas, with her husband, fellow poet Mark Wagenaar. Wagenaar's Mercy Spurs the Bone was selected by Philip Levine as winner of the 2013 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. The book was published by Anhinga Press in 2014.

MERCY SPURS THE BONE
BY CHELSEA WAGENAAR
$17.00. (email us for availability)

Levine Prize in Poetry 2014
Chelsea Wagenaar is incredibly gifted and audacious; her language is constantly inventive. -- Philip Levine, from "A Look at Philip Levine: A Massachusetts Poetry Festival Feature Poet"

To "pray" is cognate with Old English fricgan, "to ask," and at the heart of each of these marvelous poems -- by turns petition, plea, praise, penance -- is a question about the mystery of incarnation. "What holds love after the body?" Wagenaar asks in "Swift Perpetua" -- the ephemera (coins, bullets, keys) extracted by a laryngologist from human throats, the anguished notes of a sonata teased on their "thin stems" from the hull of a piano by an abandoned daughter, Thomas's doubts opened to truth by touch, a woman's erotic awakening into the revelation that "to live in the body is to die in it." These poems, ever mindful of the tender mercies of the first Maker, are heir to Dickinson's paradox of grace: "I dwelt, as if Myself were out, / My Body but within / Until a Might detected me / And set my kernel in." In ardent conflation of Beloved/beloved, Wagenaar writes: "Good morning, you say, though I know it is only / because there are no names for what you feel most. / Forgive me for how I don’t know you." -- Lisa Russ Spaar

It is not often that one encounters mastery in a debut book of poems, but that is exactly what happens in Chelsea Wagenaar's Mercy Spurs the Bone, where the poems are crafted into light-filled islands of lyric selfhood, small Edens of conceptual originality and rigorously precise language. Writing in an elliptical style, Wagenaar achieves that articulation of being, that mysterious symbiosis of self and world, which is at the very heart of poetry. A double gift, then: this brilliant beginning, and more than sufficient promise of the wonders that are sure to follow. -- B.H. Fairchild

Chelsea Wagenaar

MERCY SPURS THE BONE BY CHELSEA WAGENAAR$17.00. (email us for availability)

Levine Prize in Poetry 2014Chelsea Wagenaar is incredibly gifted and audacious; her language is constantly inventive. -- Philip Levine, from "A Look at Philip Levine: A Massachusetts Poetry Festival Feature Poet"

MERCY SPURS THE BONE
BY CHELSEA WAGENAAR
$17.00. (email us for availability)

Levine Prize in Poetry 2014
Chelsea Wagenaar is incredibly gifted and audacious; her language is constantly inventive. -- Philip Levine, from "A Look at Philip Levine: A Massachusetts Poetry Festival Feature Poet"