At Home with Disquiet

Compelling, urgent, lean, Erin Wilson's poems read as though Emily Dickinson's secret love child ran off to Canada and mated with a wolf. -- Roger Mitchell, The Hamilton Stone

Raw, tender, always unsparing, Wilson gives us a woman growing even as her children grow, revealing to her more of the world, dissipating the violence of the self. Total easement is not granted--just, perhaps, a gentler reckoning with existence.

This is one of the most powerful gathering of poems I've read in years.... Our study is to understand that a new voice has strode across the field, and made its place. -- Brian Brett, author of To Your Scattered Bodies Go (2011 CBC poetry prize) and Uproar's Your Only Music (Globe & Mail Book of the Year)

... Bursting with abundance and beauty.... This is a book of dualities, of not only odes but laments, for the hand that generously gives is also the hand that harrows.... This book will smolder inside you long after you close its pages. -- Francesca Bell, author of Bright Stain and A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito

... A rich poetic narrative, the sensual and delicate moments of life, as well as the small but profound details of hunger, desire, and connection.... Wilson takes us through growing pains in all stages of life and returns us to the bittersweet sense of home, or as she puts it, "taking the portal directly into being (which ends way past sorrow), / being the willing slave to marvel." -- Abbie Copeland, Dying Dahlia

I would call At Home with Disquiet a triumph--however, this poetry grants no illusion of conquering or overcoming or divining the essence of whatever it is that has shaped it. With the insight and grace of a resolute and keenly observant desert dweller, Wilson is a Desert Mother of Kathleen Norris' plains, the kind who "leans into herself like tilted kindling... The mother burns." -- Nina Murray, author of Minimize Considered and Alcestis in the Underworld