75 pages, Ithaca House

"Mahler, not surprisingly, often thought the weather was confessing something; in Julia Wendell's first book of poems the music is always confessing something that is vital and elemental like the weather. Storms of light and storms of darkness traverse one another in these pages--the air clears, all colors are rinsed--we are not unchanged, and yet amazingly we are allowed to feel like ourselves again."

--Norman Dubie

"However difficult the history that compelled them, Wendell's poems always struggle toward love." --Booklist

"It is not often that a first book is so seriously charged and in charge of its poetic world. The emergence of An Otherwise Perfect History is a welcome one." --Southern Poetry Review