LAMBDA WINNER! Mysterious Acts by My People by Valerie Wetlaufer

Mysterious Acts by My People by Valerie Wetlaufer
ISBN: 978-1-937420-66-6
Release Date: 3/14/14

Mysterious Acts by My People is a fearless exploration of love, grief, violence, and humor. Wetlaufer documents the search for comfort and deliverance in language rich with materiality and great pleasure. The lyrical vivacity of these poems reveals a world where bodies are capable of miracles and deterioration, tremendous loss, and grace.

Mark Wunderlich says of this title, "The mysterious acts in Valerie Wetlaufer’s striking debut are many, and those acts are magnified by her keen attention to the ruptures and illusions of human longing. Love and Eros are threaded through her taut lines, her finely crafted stanzas. Perhaps most startling are the poems in which Wetlaufer takes her readers back into a reconstructed and imagined past in which a 19th century Midwestern woman’s psyche and passion, her madness and her revenges and loves are made manifest, imagined, shaped and voiced. History here is harrowed, made new, made strange by being brought into language, into the light. Mysterious Acts by My People marks the arrival of a poet who possesses great gifts of imagination, spirit, music and heart."