That Winter the Wolf Came

by Juliana Spahr

Overview

That Winter the Wolf Came is written for this era of global struggle. It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mother’s hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what we’re up against.

"In her poems, love does not resist the world beyond; love lets it in. Politics demands feeling rather than denuding it."  —Los Angeles Review of Books

"Geography, economics, ecology, hydrology, local and international history; repetition, flat limited diction, lengthy chant; intersections of incompatible discourses, such as a field biologist’s checklist plus memoir, medical record plus ode, incantation plus site report: Spahr draws on these resources and procedures to make poems that feel like bizarre, careful essays, and essays that feel like sad, extended poems."  —The Nation

"...a work of crisp wit, bizarre conjunctions and ultimately enduring moral authority."  —Publisher’s Weekly

Excerpt:

It was Non-Revolution. Or it was me. Or it was Non-Revolution and me. I was unsure what it really was. Maybe it was my thoughts. My thoughts at one minute about Non-Revolution. About the smell of Non-Revolution. Sweat, urine, sage, pot, rotting food, hay, all mixed together. Perhaps about Non-Revolution’s body. I am sure I am not the only one who has thought it exceptional, but I am also just as sure that by the standards of bodies, Non-Revolution’s is fine but not exceptional. That is the point. That is why Non-Revolution is called Non-Revolution, why they have revolution as a possibility in their name but it is a modified and thus negated possibility so as to suggest they are possibly neither good nor fucked. Still something about Non-Revolution’s smell and body had gotten into me.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934639177
Publisher:	AK PR INC
Publication date:	08/11/2015
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Juliana Spahr is a writer of literature, a literary critic, a shaper of literary communities through editing, and a relentless collaborator. In addition to editing Commune Editions, she edits the book series Chain Links with Jena Osman and the collectively funded Subpress with nineteen other people. With David Buuck she wrote Army of Lovers (City Lights, 2014). She has edited with Stephanie Young A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machinegun Feminism (Chain Links, 2011), with Joan Retallack Poetry & Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave, 2006), and with Claudia Rankine American Women Poets

Table of Contents

Transitory, Momentary 11

Brent Crude 19

If You Were a Bluebird 29

Calling You Here 39

Dynamic Positioning 43

Tradition 53

Went Looking and Found Coyotes 59

It's All Good, It's All Fucked 65

Turnt 81

Editorial Reviews

That Winter the Wolf Came is Spahr's Occupy book: Its nine thoughtful, wiry works (three in prose, six in verse) ask how it felt and what it means to remain a disillusioned opponent of capitalism, a not-quite-despondent environmental observer and an anxious parent today…Like Claudia Rankine's celebrated Citizen, Spahr's book is a set of interlocking parts, some lyrical, some starkly factual, best read whole. Like Citizen, it can leave you somber, or angrily alert, or simply impressed.

The New York Times Book Review - Stephen Burt

★ 08/17/2015
In clear-spoken songs, this latest collection by critic and poet Spahr (This Connection of Everyone with Lungs) moves between poetry and prose as it inhabits the space of the “Non-Revolution.” Whether marching with a child in protests that approach riots or considering the lives of geese in the context of modern oil wars, Spahr’s attempts at understanding what to do in politically fraught times repeatedly return to the complicated project of simply understanding the times themselves. A poem in tight couplets, for instance, details in starkly affecting language the specifics of the explosion that initiated the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill: “Then drill pipe pressure high again. Then sea-/ Water is pumped. Kill line full. Kill line// Opened, bled to mini trip tank.” When the pieces become more internal than documentary, they maintain the same directness of thought: “We lost all the skirmishes, even the one called the PR war./ But that winter, we were there./ Under a tarp. Close. Together/ Just dealing with. Together. Went looking and found coyotes.” Beautiful and urgent, the pieces open up and allow the lyrical to inhabit logic, the political to become embodied. Spahr has been carefully developing a mode of writing over several books, and here it sings at its brilliant best. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

11/15/2015
Award-winning poet and activist Spahr recently joined with Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover to found Commune Editions, a poetry press designed to further their political convictions; the radical press AK is distributing. In her first Commune title, Spahr links ecological and economic crisis in poems that are near-documentary ("The Brent Crude Oil Spot price is 112.11 when the police come the first time") or list-like and consciously repetitive so that we feel the weight of a natural world at risk ("If you were a snowy plover, you'd be surface feeding/ if you were a northern pintail, you'd be continually whistling"). VERDICT Forthright and artless; for the politically engaged, even if they don't read poetry.

Library Journal