Disfortune is not in the mainstream of American poetic speech, nor is it easily placed into any of the well-known poetic speech-camps that have arisen on its margins. Terse, haunting lyrics expose the irreducible contradictions of living, wherein “the talking-singing, the whole talking-/singing ball of yarn, begins to unravel.” Deceptively casual in tone, these poems offer startling confrontations with “the unoriginal/oblivion,” with “the contrived delicacy/of what is emptied and kept.” Joe Wenderoth sees “fortune” as the mute history of events proceeding toward the ultimate security; his poems arise from “disfortune,” from the need “Just to sing the song that’s kept you/quiet/all this time.” This book is a rare occurrence, marking not only a new intimacy with the world, but also a remembering of the determined motion of intimacy itself.Wenderoth’s poetry features Terse and haunting lyrics that mark a new intimacy with the world
“Joe Wenderoth’s brave new poetic talent is like nothing so much as a live wire writing its own epitaph in sparks. [His poems] throb brilliantly with a sense of the ‘too much,’ which Longinus identified with the sublime. But in Wenderoth’s case the too much is the too little or the too ordinary – a very remarkable discovery to have made so late in the history of poetry. Philip Larkin and a few American poets have approached it, but Wenderoth’s instrument is sharper than theirs; he makes quick cuts in the meat of the ordinary, which is the meat of the impossible.”—Calvin Bedient,Colorado Review
“At times, Wenderoth’s poems sound like a tougher, demotic Stevens: skewed aphorisms aimed precisely at our sense that we can be fully at ease in ‘position.’ In other poems, his difficulty is more like Paul Celan’s. His word-play brings an image—say, trelÓ0
![Disfortune: Poems [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/4/2/3/2_3429027.jpg "Disfortune: Poems [Paperback]")