Description: Poetry. "Lesley Wheeler's new volume of poems, RADIOLAND, spellbinds with the gorgeous sounds of its poetry: 'Drag belly over gravel on a cave-lip / into the TV and sleep in it,' one poem opens. Note the insouciant forging of ancient and quotidian scenes, the modulation of vowels punctuated by v's: I'm hooked! Wheeler is, among other glories, a consummate formalist, but she is also profound in her exploration of the governing trope of this collection: the deeply human struggles in which families engage to be receptors and transmitters of love (the crisis brought to a head by the unforgiven father's death). In RADIOLAND's disturbed emissions and reception, we cannot always tell what's '[s]ignal and noise,' but at the borderland to the absolute, Wheeler is surefooted in her exploration of love's echoing 'parley' in the world."--Cynthia Hogue
Brief description: Lesley Wheeler's previous collections include HETEROTOPIA, winner of the 2009 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; The Receptionist and Other Tales, a James Tiptree, Jr. Award Honor Book; and Heathen. Her most recent critical study is Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present, and she blogs about poetry at lesleywheeler(dot)org. Winner of an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia, and of fellowships from Fulbright and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Wheeler teaches at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.