Sunshine Wound

L. S. Klatt’s first book, Interloper, was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2009. His second collection, Cloud of Ink, won the Iowa Poetry Prize and came out from the University of Iowa Press in 2011. His lyric poem “Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies At 91” was anthologized in Best American Poetry 2011 and subsequently made into a ninety-second animated film. He is the current Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Reviews

“While the poems in this alert collection rarely depend on specific geography, there is a strong sense of somewhere here. These poems catch the mind in the process of thinking and plot the subtle constellations that arise from the intersection between the actual and the imaginary. Shades and tones and moods are evoked, as we might find in the paintings many of these poems reference. And yet, there are quiet echoes of our real world of human endeavor to provide a sense that something’s out-of-whack as well as the sense there’s something vital to hope for. This is a deeply satisfying book.”

Maurice Manning

“An abstracted yet intensely material apocalyptic hope stalks L. S. Klatt’s Sunshine Wound, whose lyrics possess the eerie, chimerical power of skeuomorphs. Vestiges of patriotism, religious ardor, d(e)volution, astronomy, visual art, indexical obsession, classical philosophy, and Westward expansion are conflated with synthetic or surreally altered manifestations of the same, and the result is an eerily prescient articulation of the individual in America—our history, artifice, moxie, anxiety, and faith—in all its dizzying twenty-first-century velocity.”

Lisa Russ Spaar

“This beautiful collection of lyric poems shimmers with dream-like transformations and the kind of inspiring freedom one finds in the notebooks of Sigmar Polke and the journals of  Ralph Waldo Emerson. Klatt invites us into a world that, like our recollections of childhood, is strange and a bit menacing, but suffused with an undefinable aura of possibility. . . . Klatt understands that the poet must build a Rube Goldberg apparatus to set the strange music of delight back in motion. I loved this book.”

Geoffrey Nutter