The Violent and the Fallen

In James Matthew Wilson’s second chapbook of poems, The Violent and the Fallen, we enter the lives of retail bankers, voluptuous lifeguards, alcoholic balloon vendors, and “wiry and cavern-chested” cruisers killing time in the vacancies of the Midwest. We visit the dilapidated grandeur of post-industrial South Bend, those forgotten places “Far from the New Yorker,” along with the churches, bars, graveyards, vineyards, and encampments of a violent and fallen world. Building on the narrative form of his earlier Four Verse Letters, Wilson’s book guides us through the violence of desire in search of those permanent things by means of which we may redeem and bring order to our lives.

One of the most wide-ranging and provocative cultural critics of his generation, and one of our most impassioned defenders of traditional verse forms, Wilson collects here twenty-one new poems at once severe and restrained, difficult and affecting.