Sunny Wednesday

By Noelle Kocot

• Description
• Reviews
• Bio

• Poems of exquisite pain and conciliation.
  
  A collection of complex and exultant poems by one of Brooklyn’s most devoted and dynamic poets, Sunny Wednesday proves poetry’s ability to manifest hope out of loss.

• Characterized by an utter irreducibility, Noelle Kocot’s poetry displays an elemental movement of thinking and suggests a poetics of vision. The specific vision in Kocot’s newest collection, Sunny Wednesday, is one of loss and the impossible yet necessary compensations for loss-an awfully complex yet perfectly human vision.
  Jean-Paul Pecqueur, Rain Taxi
  
  And amid all the hard truths, readers will find, if not consolation, then companionship, a voice willing to say it’s normal to be sad, and it’s even okay to have some fun at the same time.
  Craig Morgan Teicher, from an interview with Kocot at Publishers Weekly
  
  Often breathtaking, at times impenetrable, this latest collection from Kocot intersperses frantic images with hauntingly simple and loss-laden outcries.
  Publishers Weekly
  
  Her fourth volume of work, Sunny Wednesday, is the brainchild of an expert poet...
  The Midwest Book Review
  
  It was then that I knew I was entering a world inside these poems, one complete with myths, laws and an overarching organizational structure...a system for explaining how things happen and why. How we deal with tragedy. How we survive.
  My Gorgeous Somewhere Blog
  
  Kocot is a two-way transmitter, an open node between this world and some Other Place (and, it therefore follows, between that Other Place’s occupants and ourselves). Her work is exuberantly weird, mournful and talkative, somehow exotic and hysterical at once ... Noelle Kocot is an immensely gifted and endlessly compelling writer, and Sunny Wednesday is almost certainly her greatest book to date.
  Justin Taylor, Flaunt, Issue 101
  
  Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five, of death, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” In Sunny Wednesday, that sentiment is only partly true: everything here hurts. No page is read without feeling the sting and burn of the realization that, one day, the one you love most of all will be gone, not coming back. For Kocot it is her late husband, the composer Damon Tomblin. If there is any good that can come out of death, it is the fact that Kocot is able to create something beautiful and necessary out of the hurt that must be enveloping her.
  John Findura, Tarpaulin Sky
  
  Perhaps Kocot’s “vatic library” is, at once, “searing” in its imprinting of loss and resourceful as a language-(re)source that restores memory ... as a sensory/conceptual event. The reader steps on Kocot’s poetic “Neptune” to witness such significant events.
  Thomas Fink, Boog City
  
  Furthermore, whereas many poets use poetry as one of the ways to organize, make sense of, and explode the presences and experience of the overwhelming fullness of life, Kocot seems to be using it to make sense of this fullness in the face of the Void, an unshakeable and overwhelming emptiness/absence, one brimming simultaneously with meaning and meaninglessness, breath and breathlessness, ritual and randomness, aloneness and loneliness, music and silence, darkness and light.
  Matt Hart, Coldfront
  
  Turning the reader away from platitudes about love, loss, and death’s immutability, Kocot’s elegiac poetry, read in light of Altieri’s theory, brings to the forefront of interpretation the dynamic between the deployment of conative strategies, the articulation of possible results, and assessment of their value.
  Thomas Fink, Reconstruction
  

• Noelle Kocot is the author of many collections of poetry, including Ascent of the Mothers (November 2023), God's Green Earth (Wave Books, 2020), Phantom Pains of Madness (Wave Books, May 2016), Soul in Space (Wave Books, 2013), The Bigger World (Wave Books, 2011), and a book of translations of some of the poems of Tristan Corbière, Poet by Default (Wave Books, 2011). Their previous works include the discography Damon's Room, (Wave Books Pamphlet Series, 2010), Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009) and Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006). They are also the author of 4 and The Raving Fortune (both from Four Way Books). Their poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry in 2001, 2012, and 2013. They are the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry, the American Poetry Review, and a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Kocot has taught at the University of Texas New Writers' Project and currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the New School. They live in New Jersey.