No Real Light

By Joe Wenderoth

• Description
• Reviews

• A clear-eyed fourth collection, searching and solemn, dissatisfied with artificial condolences and pat maxims. Wenderoth’s determination in the face of harsh realities is what rescues us, and him, from hopelessness.

• Best-known for his gritty and uproarious prose poetry collection Letters to Wendy’s (2000), Wenderoth began his career with two books of gimlet-eyed, world-weary, hard-hitting poetry. Now he returns to verse, favoring (as before) relatively short poems, often 12 lines or fewer, most of which crackle with a bleakness that’s part gallows humor, part outrage, and part despair...
  Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
  
  If you haven’t checked in with Wenderoth in a while, then the opening poem of No Real Light, “The Weight Of What Is Thrown,” might throw you-it is earnest, thoughtful, delicate, and utterly lacking anything regarding fisting.
  Kevin Carollo, Rain Taxi
  
  In No Real Light, Joe Wenderoth performs the kind of madness that is no performance, but rather a depiction of the mind in extremis. He takes the tools of meaning-making and uses them to build a ladder for us to climb down... into a uniquely 21st century quagmire of existential problems.
  Dan Rosenberg, Mantis