Books

Hesitation Waltz now available for preorder at Midwest Writing Center!

Hesitation Waltz is brimming with the world’s many engines. Amie Whittemore’s lyric offers a space of potential where the pastoral meets the social. Even as the questions the speaker asks grow heavier –-“Who’s complicit?”—the poems grow lighter. “We’re all the kingdoms we inherit, their riches / as much as their precarity.” Whittemore’s poems ask the ways the world is both “ruined and beautiful” with us in it, and insists the task of tending to it is luminous in its imperative. –C. T. Salazar

“In Nest of Matches, Amie Whittemore has the audacity to create a series of poems titled “Another Queer Love Poem that Fails” and then embeds them in a book that beautifies queerness as a source of possibility, transformation, and survival. The poems in Nest of Matches struggle with understanding the queer self as lovable, as desirable, even as worthy of life (“is it possible to love one’s own tattered self, treat it like a switch-queen”). Yet, at the same time, this book celebrates and anoints this confused, combustible self (“Litter, confetti; what’s / the difference? It shines like it belongs”). This is a book of winter on the cusp of spring, a heart that wants to abandon “good [as] a synonym for being good.” If you are lost in the dark, Whittemore will grab hold of your hand and run with you toward the moon.
—Eric Tran

order Nest of Matches today!

“Amie Whittemore’s complex and beautiful collection is an imaginative triptych that takes readers through a universe that can whet so many appetites. Through lyric epistles to extraterrestrials, we read about a desire made—not by contact—but by the absence after. In interstellar explorations, there’s a struggle with inherited longings. Through it all we see the refusal to translate the unknowable. Instead of all the rehearsed intimacies, here they are sudden and gray, delicious and over too soon. Every turn surprises and deepens, and I’m in awe of these poems, how the search for connection can cross time, distance and celestial address, and how a person can finally meet themselves in the care of others.” – Traci Brimhall

order Star-Tent today! (only available from me as Tolsun Books is on hiatus)

In stunningly lush and organic lines filled with milkweed, soybeans, and marigold, where heartcall is answered by birdsong, and both land and speaker are palimpsestically haunted by past and future seasons, Amie Whittemore fills her dream ark with vivid catalogues, memories, and visions. In poems that weave together “an entire imaginary alphabet from a single letter” with the intricate architectural skill of a bird’s nest braiding together hair and twigs, these poems ricochet between rivetingly fierce consciousness and pure animal
joy in a journey that is as harrowing as it is lustrous.

—Lee Ann Roripaugh

order Glass Harvest today!