Posted October 8th, 2015 at 10:58 am
Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners has received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly:
. . . in this marvelous selection [the editors] heed Wieners’s call to “visit this house often, / imbue my life with success, / leave me not alone.” A bridge between the radical content of Allen Ginsberg and the mainstream, Wieners’s writing fuses the plainspoken with the florid: “I wish I was a dancer/ and cd. move/ in feet/ undo my body.” Unapologetically queer and overtly sexual, he worries through the reality of gay life in mid-20th-century America. There is a deep concern with poetry as muse and form, and the poems “burn in the memory of love.” But Wieners also sees the danger in that love . . . With this publication and the recent release of his journals, Wieners’s plea not to be left alone is a step closer to being realized.
A preview from Supplication, the (hitherto uncollected) 1956 poem “Not Complete Enough,” also appears in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine.