Full Description
A dazzling debut that blends folklore with the everyday
Drifting between the past and present, the material and the otherworldly, Who Follow the Gleam melts lore and magic with history to shape distinctive narratives of childhood, fatherhood, and personhood. In his debut poetry collection, Christian Wessels crosses centuries and takes his readers with him to Germany's Black Forest, burning hotels, chromatic casinos, and Long Island's dazing Sound. Uncanny elements of folklore and dreamlike stories are grounded in the atmosphere of the natural world as Wessels turns the sun, moss, and clouds into characters connecting his poems: "maybe I myself am the sun; am / the brilliant silence engraved / in stone; am the arc / through which the future becomes / legible."
In the world of this collection, intuition, feelings, dreams, and spells mimic cycles, patterns, rules, and structure as the speaker disappears in the magic of language, only to resurface in the everyday. In four sections, Wessels reckons with a changing world, evolving and sometimes unfamiliar, while coming to terms with the uncertain future: "The cloud looks / like me, it looks like me because / the present moves, the present moves." This collection is a sensitive meditation on the power of passed-down knowledge—personal and collective, factual and mythical—and how such knowledge finds its embodiment in the world.
Contents
Sympathetic Magic from the Black Forest
The American Tower
Spell for a Friend
Vision from a Three-Eyed Cod
Reanimation Spell in a Brine Jar
Against Birds
Black Forest Anachronism
Vague and Impure Things
*
Pilgrim Hotel
Natural Questions
Healing Charm for the End of the Day
Two Spells for the Weathering Rind
A Green Night
Hypnosis
Little Ice Age
*
Our Snail
In the Blue Casino
Gesualdo, in Five Voices
Levitation Charm
Black Forest Omen
In Hölderlin's Tower
*
Frog Lessons for Lola
Cliff Diving in the Nature Preserve
The Master Arborist
Setauket Mallards
Kelp Forest
Kaspar Hauser
Acknowledgments
