The Courier's Archive & Hymnal

Poetry. THE COURIER'S ARCHIVE & HYMNAL navigates a purgatory made nearly pastoral by a necrotic vision of consumptive rivers, ghost mazes, corpsethieves, and stalkerish moons. With an exacting, halted diction, Joshua Marie Wilkinson swerves us deeper toward the source of this dark archive, stirring our courier to contemplate Basho, Beckett, Kafka, Matta-Clark in hope of materializing a "name for no becoming, stammering through wind." The result is a hypnotizing meditation of mood, mind, perdition, and image. In other words, book three of Wilkinson's No Volta pentology picks up exactly where its predecessors SELENOGRAPHY and SWAMP ISTHMUS leave off. That is to say, beyond the good myths, to a decidedly singular poetic territory "recasting the future freshly black."