Hey, speaking of books I read\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I’ve Been Reading This Week<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Five full poetry collections, my dudes, it is a celebration week. We are seeing an ambitious, wildly inventive, highly personal yet alluringly strange project wrap up. A pentalogy of poetry collections, told in long lyrics, set in bustling yet lonely nightmarescape where it\u2019s always raining and the only light is an annihilating moon or cautious lanterns making moths dust. Down these strange streets bordered by bad woods walks the meadow slasher and rides the courier. I’m talking, of course, about Selenography<\/em>, Swamp Isthmus<\/em>, The Courier’s Archive & Hymnal<\/em>, Meadow Slasher<\/em>, and Bad Woods<\/em>, aka the No Volta <\/em>pentalogy by Joshua Marie Wilkinson. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Selenography<\/em>: <\/strong>the title means mapping the moon, and I think titles are instructive. The poems are written in response to Polaroids taken by Califone\u2019s Tim Rutili, and they inform each other as well. Don\u2019t think that there\u2019s any promise of communication, here, though. The Polaroids are tastefully smudged, and if memory serves, Josh was thumbing through a shoebox full of the photos at Tim\u2019s house. \u201cHey can I use these for my book\u201d \u201csure.\u201d Don\u2019t take my word as gospel unless you remember that the gospels are also questionable sources written decades after the fact, and don\u2019t come to these poems expecting something as corporate slogan ready as two paths diverting in the woods. But there will be woods. You don\u2019t want the woods, but there will be woods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Swamp Isthmus<\/strong><\/em>:<\/strong> I should have said already, you are doing yourself the greatest disservice if you dont read Josh poems out loud. A friend recently asked me how I read poetry. I don\u2019t really have a good answer\u2014that\u2019s why The Line Break exists\u2014but go cover to cover and read out loud as much as you can. Swamp Isthmus might be the one of these five that benefits the most\u2014like Selenography, these are multi-page long fragmented lyrics. Unlike Selenography, we\u2019re dispensing with punctuation and letting the words paint splatter over the white space. Reading these books back to back is a way to see how repeated images start to circle around meaning. The poems themselves pick things up and drop them in the span of a few lines\u2014you might think \u201cthese things don\u2019t mean anything together\u201d\u2014but as I tell my guitar students about soloing, repetition legitimizes. Repetition makes things sticky while complicating initial perception. Kinda like a swamp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Courier\u2019s Archive and Hymnal<\/em>: <\/strong>it\u2019s possible the speaker is the same throughout the pentalogy, it\u2019s possible that there are multiple characters. The influence of The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You ghosts over these five books, but there are overt characters like Jimmy or whomever. This book is written like the journal of a bike messenger, prose fragments knifing through a city.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meadow Slasher<\/em>: <\/strong>the breakdown. Our speaker\u2019s in a bad way, there\u2019s no way around it, no metaphor to tuck away emotion, no mystery about which parts of Andersonville we\u2019re crying in or stumble-drunk in. The speaker is chiding himself as \u201cthe master of bloodless experiment \/ of cottoncandy surrealism & the so-called new brutalism. \/ Of battletide & conceptual genuflecting,\u201d and whether or not that’s entirely true is immaterial. There is a shift to a bit more communication in this book than the previous three. Yet we\u2019re still in the strange world of couriers and swamps across the Cumberland Gap. Formally, this is one long lyric, made of what I\u2019ve seen Josh describe as \u201cbroken sonnets.\u201d 11 lines, no volta. Hey, title of the pentalogy. It, combined with Josh\u2019s unmatched musicality, makes for mesmerizing reading. Mental breakdowns and fantasies of self harm aside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bad Woods<\/em>: <\/strong>is good. You can understand why it took 16 years to wrap up the pentalogy\u2014a lot changes\u2014yet Bad Woods<\/em> still unmistakably belongs with Selenography<\/em> and everything in between. Part of that is repeated images and recurring characters, part of that is style. There\u2019s still a world here, though. Even if some of the places have been situated in the real world\u2014Chicago, Athens, various outposts of Tennessee\u2014the specific nightmarescape of the No Volta<\/em> pentalogy remains singular. Syllabus this with Frank Stanford\u2019s Arkansas in Battlefield.<\/em> I can\u2019t recommend these books enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n LINKS! <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Something to listen to while you browse? Remember that Lissie performance on <\/em>Twin Peaks??!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"five](\"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/image-15.png\")