Anchorage: Poems by Mark Wunderlich

From the Publisher

In this debut collection, Mark Wunderlich creates a central metaphor of the body as anchor for the soul - but it is a body in peril, one set in motion through the landscape of desire. In poems located in New York's summer streets, in the barren snowfields of Wisconsin, and along stretches of Cape Cod's open shoreline, the lover speaks to the beloved in the form of lyrical missives, arguments, and intimate monologues. The poems converse with each other; images repeat and echo in an effect that is strange and beautiful. Uniting the collection is an original and consistent voice - one that has found a hard won stance against the haphazard and negotiates with what is needful and sufficient.

New Yorker

Chasing the 'notion that sex is like faith,' these poems, in both verse and prose, are as unsettling and intimate as a blood test. If Wunderlich's anchor, the body, repeatedly fetches up on weedy shoals, his book reminds us how fully the spirit can illuminate the depths.

The New Yorker

Poised between the shocks of furtive sex and limpid scenes of the summer seaside, Wenderlich's first collection of perms follows the heart's appetitive course...these poems, in both verse and prose, are as unsettling and intimate as a blood test. If Wunderlich's anchorm the body, repeatedly fetches up on weedy shoals, his book reminds us how fully the spirit can illuminate the depths.

What People Are Saying

J. D. McClatchy
The last time I was so struck as I am now reading Mark Wunderlich's new collection of poems, I was gazing at an immense Greek vase, on whose elegantly fired red and black surface were warriors, at once flaunting and shielding their nakedness, struggling with their fates, or crushed by them in eerily erotic attitudes. The Anchorage bravely takes up the raw mess of desire and pain, the cold ache of longing and loss, and in sleek and searing poems exposes the way we live now to the larger powers of the racing heart and the radiant imagination. This is a scary, sad, ecstatic, astonishing book--and a brilliant debut.

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