Summer 2023 | Poetry
Joni Wallace
The Self Making Eyes at Itself
The red swimsuit. The woman who wears it. The octopus belt. Geometric cuts of sea foam. The spotted ray. The burnt-orange of a starfish. The knot of seagulls aloft. The brutalist apartment building. The pink house. Two women locked in embrace. The seagulls upright in sand. The blue sedan. The wolf and the dog. The bucolic cow. The lamb. The monkey mask. The whale reflected. A dirigible. The pale moon. The buttery sun. The mauve skyline. Desire. The self-organizing ants. The self imaging itself. Waves, gears, paisleys. The self personifying itself. Hummingbird, bees, sand fleas flying out of the self.
Joni Wallace's third full-length poetry collection is Landscape with Missing River (Barrow Street Press, 2023). Her honors include Four Way Books’ Levis Prize for her first collection, Blinking Ephemeral Valentine, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Baltic Writing Residency.
Joni recommends: A Film in Which I Play Everyone, Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf, 2024); Thrust, Lidia Yuknavitch (Penguin Random House, 2023); and Chariot, Timothy Donnelly (Wave Books, 2023).