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.
- 99 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- 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
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Yes, you can access Who Follow the Gleam by Christian Wessels in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & American Poetry. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.