No Real Light

By Joe Wenderoth

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• A clear-eyed fourth collection, searching and solemn, dissatisfied with artificial condolences and pat maxims. Wenderoth’s determination in the face of harsh realities is what rescues us, and him, from hopelessness.

• Best-known for his gritty and uproarious prose poetry collection Letters to Wendy’s (2000), Wenderoth began his career with two books of gimlet-eyed, world-weary, hard-hitting poetry. Now he returns to verse, favoring (as before) relatively short poems, often 12 lines or fewer, most of which crackle with a bleakness that’s part gallows humor, part outrage, and part despair...
  Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
  
  If you haven’t checked in with Wenderoth in a while, then the opening poem of No Real Light, “The Weight Of What Is Thrown,” might throw you-it is earnest, thoughtful, delicate, and utterly lacking anything regarding fisting.
  Kevin Carollo, Rain Taxi
  
  In No Real Light, Joe Wenderoth performs the kind of madness that is no performance, but rather a depiction of the mind in extremis. He takes the tools of meaning-making and uses them to build a ladder for us to climb down... into a uniquely 21st century quagmire of existential problems.
  Dan Rosenberg, Mantis
  
  

• Wesleyan University Press published Joe Wenderoth’s first two books of poetry, Disfortune and It Is If I Speak. Wave Books published his third book of poems, No Real Light (2007), and fourth, If I Don't Breathe How Do I Sleep (2014). Wave Books also published his novel, Letters To Wendy’s (2000), and The Holy Spirit Of Life: Essays Written For John Ashcroft’s Secret Self (2005).
  
  Joe Wenderoth's films and artwork can be found on YouTube. His audio recordings (poems, public readings, and his podcast, About Brett Favre) can be found at Internet Archive. He is currently Professor of English at UC Davis, where he teaches in the creative writing graduate program. He is also the Blind Chaperone of the Seizure State. He has been to the Corn Palace, and has generally been thought of in a very positive way by people in the industry.
  
  He is at work now on Agony: a proposal.