Out Now:
Daughter Days
While most of the poems address challenging or difficult situations, I would not call Daughter Days dark because there is acceptance of the past and movement toward the future including the love and good wishes most parents feel for their children. Wendell’s words move us forward; her excellent, spare use of language and detail convey deep truths. She does not pretend to have no flaws – another poem I’d love to discuss relates to our inability to hide our weaknesses from our children. She collects it all: shiny or bloody, perfect or sweaty, Wendell weaves it together beautifully.
—Virginia Crawford for Loch Raven Review
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
