Wyn Cooper

"From the opening words of Mars Poetica, Wyn Cooper creates for us nothing less than a manual for memory. The word "reverie" punctuates these poems, and no wonder! For in this book, Cooper wanders and dreams whole continents, the pattern of a skirt, a song no longer playing, lost friends, former homes, spent years. What will we miss the most when we have left Earth? Everything Cooper gives us here and more."

                                                                                                              —Kathy Fagan

Also available as an e-book

"A wise practitioner of the horizontal lyric—a lyric poem that does not rise, but rather spreads over surfaces, coloring them with its particular tincture of consciousness—Wyn Cooper explores an overlooked territory that lies between the crafty irony of Frank O’Hara and the more unalloyed sentiments of contemporary popular culture, discovering unexpected equivalencies and startling imbalances. His speaker’s nonchalance—a new version of negative capability-- becomes increasingly challenging as the book unfolds a universe in which, on the one hand, the ideal would be “to be insane again/to dance the loud night away,/the crowd on X, a single sway,” and on the other, reality demands that you “Speak now or forever/hold your hat in your hand.”

                                                                                                  --T. R. Hummer

Postcards from the Interior is a collection of poems in free verse, formal verse, and prose poetry. The first section, “Postcards from Vermont,” is composed of poems from Vermont towns and historical landmarks, such as Robert Frost’s grave. The second section includes poems from other settings, real and imagined.

"Postcards from the Interior mashes-up interior Vermont against the interior United States, physical landscapes against the landscapes of Hell, Dream, Desire, and Independence, as well as verse versus prose."

                                                                --Beth Bachmann, The Southern Review

This book is now in a third printing. It contains an introduction by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell, who went on to cowrite and perform a CD with Wyn, Forty Words for Fear. The CD contains a spoken word piece by producer Don Dixon, based on the title poem of this book.