One Morning—

By Rebecca Wolff

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• ***Also available as an audiobook***
  Poet, novelist, and Fence founder Rebecca Wolff’s internal monologue made external in poetry is uncanny. Her musical and darkly funny fourth collection, One Morning—, spans language, culture, art history, love, passion, grief, consumerism, environmental devastation, and the ekphrastic experience of pop and high culture. She experiments with torque, energy, narrative—two steps ahead of herself with the reader on her heels.

• One Morning— is a book about surfaces, about their complexity, inescapability, transience. Here, there may be no other art but the ekphrastic. In the famous Platonic scheme, where eternal forms are represented imperfectly in the world, nothing could be intellectually lower than ekphrasis. But maybe no other sort of knowledge exists. This is the suspicion of One Morning—, that there might be no other truth than the perception of surface, one surface indicating another, and the translation from one kind of surface into another kind…
  Jonathan Regier, Jacket2

  Wolff, who started out big with a National Poetry Series win for her first collection, Manderley, and won the Barnard Women Poets Prize for her second, The King, uses spare, twisting language in this fourth collection, which is deeply, reflectively personal yet sharply aware of the world.
  Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

  In her fourth collection, Wolff … hits with constant flashes of humor and revelation in poems as tightly controlled as they are varied. [Its] wide range is one of the collection’s finest qualities, with poems conjuring music out of fragmentation, narrative prose, rapid repetition, simple lyric imagery, and unexpected syntax.
  Publishers Weekly

  The poems… are full of ragged and sometimes sharp edges, both in form and content. These are not the abrupt disjunctions of the virtual world but something closer to a messiness of the heart and body… As a writer, editor, and publisher Wolff has for almost two decades fought on behalf of the unexpected, and One Morning— is her best book of poetry yet. It speaks to both ghosts and a very real world.
  Alan Gilbert, Boston Review

  [One Morning—] is a highly refined piece of work from a woman very much in control of her craft. The level of Rebecca Wolff’s control shines through in the entire piece. There is juxtaposition in each sentence and stanza…The [lines] are full of heart and compassion, yet still quite cerebral.
  Benjamin Champagne, NewPages
  

  Hers is a world desiring transfiguration, the renewal of harmonic convergence of self and outside-self. In this, [Wolff] is a romantic revolutionary, an exemplary detour from the dichotomous categorization of poets as being either experimental or lyrical. Yes, Wolff’s work affirms, you can have it both ways and in fact be both.
  Jon Curley, Hyperallergic
  

  The all-encompassing nature of the book is part of what makes Rebecca Wolff’s One Morning— brilliant. Perhaps the seeming lack of cohesion is what pushes the reader to burn through the 150+ pages. The poems spread like wildfire.
  Heather Lang, The Literary Review
  

  Wolff ’s work is filled with motion and trajectory…Wolff creates works that are open, that need to be filled, and she brings the reader into the role of figuring out what they want that fullness to look like. If only all American poetry were so empowering.
  Greg Bem, Rain Taxi
  

•  Rebecca Wolff is the author of five collections of poetry, one novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose. Her first book, Manderley (University of Illinois Press, 2001), was selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky. Her second, Figment (W. W. Norton & Co., 2005), was selected for the Barnard Women Poets Prize by Claudia Rankine and Eavan Boland. Her third, The King, was published by W. W. Norton in 2009.One Morning—was published by Wave Books in 2015. Slight Return was published by Wave Books in 2022. Her novel The Beginners was published by Riverhead in 2011. In 1998, Wolff founded the influential literary journal Fence; in 2001 she founded Fence Books and launched The Constant Critic website. Wolff lives in Hudson, New York, where she has served on the City Council and works in community development, with an emphasis on affordable housing and green trades training.