Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is a collection whose poems approach family, politics, and romance, often through the lens of space: the vagaries of a relationship full of wonder and coldness, separation and exploration. There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

• The Carrying
• Deaf Republic
• Ghost Of (The Omnidawn Open)
• When My Brother Was an Aztec
• Night Sky with Exit Wounds
• The Tradition
• The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
• The Octopus Museum
• Soft Science
• Wonderbook (Revised and Expanded): The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction