Come off a horse enough times,
and you learn how to fall—
Indeed, knowing how to fall allows Wendell’s open-eyed work to acknowledge pain but not be weighed down by it, moving instead to consider what blossoms and grows each passing season. Love here is represented by and extended to plants and animals—reluctant gladiolas, bursting peonies, a menagerie of dogs and birds—but nothing so beloved as horses, an anchoring and comforting presence throughout. With its crescendos and diminuendos, this book is concerned not just with falling but also art and its making, paying homage to persistence and survival through music and musicians, paintings and painters, books and their characters.
—Amanda Moore, author of Requeening (National Poetry Series)
‘I did it my way!’ goes the refrain of a popular song of self-adoration, which shrugs away regrets. The poems of The Art of Falling by Julia Wendell are far removed from that bravado. The rich life is one of smartly felt regrets as you step from oneself to another—to yet another self— amid all the roles that are thrust upon you: mother’s daughter, sister, lover, wife, mother… Not one of those selves, after all, can be perfected. If you choose oneself, you choose the elegy of the other. A self-aware life is haunted by our possible selves, and by the images that others have of us, including the regard of our beloved fellow creatures—dogs, horses, birds, foxes. The self is seen more clearly in the rifts of currents—who one was, who one might have been, who one should have been, who one seems to be to others, and who one is becoming now. The Art of Falling contains the lovely and provocative songs of a life made rich by that self-awareness.”
—David Fenza, author of The Interlude
