Crown of Wild

Winner of the 2018 Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize

"What is the sound of in ruins, broken?" In Erica Bodwell's striking debut, brokenness is inflected with pain and also with beauty. Bodwell knows how humans get damaged and do damage, and sticks close to the stressed and womanly body: its sensations, its pressures, what impinges on it, how it breaks free--or how it can't. Her sounds are dense andvivid, her characters in these formally-varied lyric narratives are as real as characters in short stories. This is a book I'll keep coming back to. -- Daisy Fried