The Spectral Wilderness (Wick Poetry First Book)

Winner of the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, Mark Doty, Judge
Named a Best Poetry Book of 2014 by Entropy Magazine

It s a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender... Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category. --Mark Doty, from the Foreword

Bendorf's poems give us all we have ever wanted. --Natalie Diaz, author of When My Brother Was An Aztec

Astonishing. --The Literary Review

Bendorf's collection indeed opens the door to a spectral wilderness, an otherworldly pastoral, a queer ecology endlessly transformed by possibility, grief, and the unruly wanting of our names and bodies. Stunningly lyrical and beautifully theoretical, The Spectral Wilderness is an invitation one cannot turn down; the book calls us to travel with Bendorf, to study the topography of becoming because what we used to be matters in the way that language matters however fleeting, however mistaken, however contradictory it might be. --Stacey Waite

What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf's poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open, he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside. The Spectral Wilderness is a wonderful book. --Ross Gay

Oliver Bendorf's poems draw unflinching attention to the process of making... Bendorf strips a poem to its scaffold with an honesty that is at once funny and unbearably sad. --Blackbird

Bendorf's first book will make you hungry for his next... I folded over the corners of the pages I liked best, and now it sits crooked on the table, all swelled up on one edge, like a board taking on water. --Chelsea Biondolillo

For any seeker desiring company during a life change great or small. --Original Plumbing