The Orchard Street Press is very pleased to announce the release of Energy and Stillness, he excellent new poetry collection by award-winning poet Bob Wickless of Reidsville, North Carolina.
About Energy and Stillness, David St. John observes: “…Bob Wickless brings the deep intimacy of James Wright’s poetry to this collection as he reflects on both familial history and its hauntings in an American past and present…As in the poems of Larry Levis, Wickless’s generous poems make a space in the heart and the imagination for those ghosts we require to keep living our lives. What a truly glorious and often heart-breaking collection.”
Regarding (riding) shotgun in imaginary cars, the collection in which a number of these poems appeared earlier, Matthew Graham notes: “Again and again while reading these powerful poems, I was reminded of Strafford’s line from “Traveling Through the Dark:” “I thought hard for us all—my only swerving.” Only these poems do not swerve. They force us to continually confront the terror and beauty of time and memory, of being alive. They think hard for us all, and we are better for it.”
Bob Wickless was born in Frederick, Maryland and attended the public schools there. He received a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Maryland and his Master’s in Writing from Johns Hopkins. He has published poems in many magazines and journals—American Scholar, Antioch Review, Poetry, and Shenandoah among them, and he is the only poet to have had work appear in every edition to date of Orchard Street’s annual anthology, Quiet Diamonds. Two chapbooks, Almost Happy (2020) and (riding) shotgun in imaginary cars (2021), and his earlier full-length collection, The Secret Care the World Takes (2023) are all available from The Orchard Street Press. He now lives in Reidsville, North Carolina.
Energy and Stillness is available (both online and via the mail) for $18 from
The Orchard Street Press
P.O. Box 280; Gates Mills, OH 44040
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