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. The Anchorage is a collection of love poems for the end of the millennium and takes as its subjects the dichotomies of love and illness, the urban and the rural, homosexual desire and familial tension. Wunderlich faces the complexities of contemporary life through poems that are both tender and striving and that leave the reader with an image of the body as a door through which one can transcend the suffering of the world.

Author: Mark Wunderlich
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 05/13/1999
Pages: 72
Weight: 0.46lbs
Size: 9.37h x 6.34w x 0.57d
ISBN: 9781558492004


Award: 1999 Lambda Literary Awards Winner - Gay Poetry


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 06/15/1999 pg. 919
New Yorker (The) 01/17/2000 pg. 83
Univ PR Books for Public Libry 01/01/2000 pg. 80 - Strongly Recommended

About the Author
Mark Wunderlich is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Winner of the 1997 Writers at Work Poetry Fellowship, he is also the recipient of a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.