En Route by Jesse Wolfe
(eBook)
 
In this debut poetry collection, Jesse Wolfe meditates on the journeys that carry us through life. In sections that focus on individuals, couples, and families, Wolfe employs a range of speakers and characters: male and female, young and old, wealthy and poor. Some have a clear sense of where they're going, while others feel cast adrift; some reach back into their memories or look toward the future, while others seek an expansive present moment; some find peace and at-one-ment, while others remain in quandaries. Taken together, they offer a mosaic of consciousness, as people strive and introspect, suffer and heal, each of them en route through their overlapping stories.
 
Jesse Wolfe's poetry has appeared in publications including Tower Journal, Good Works Review, Mad Swirl, and Eunoia Review. An English professor at California State University, Stanislaus, Wolfe previously served as Faculty Advisor to Penumbra, the campus's student-run literary and art journal. His scholarly work includes the monograph Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and a forthcoming book on intimacy in contemporary British and American fiction. 
 
Jesse Wolfe’s gorgeous debut collection, En Route, investigates the sharper edges of interpersonal relationships, family, loss, and transformation in a series of exciting, accessible poems that create an interior landscape out of the markings of the exterior. Wolfe paints quietly self-assured portraits of real people struggling toward something they don’t fully understand…and may never actually be able to achieve. Faced with pregnancies, grief, barbed wire, wildflowers, “whistling bombs”, and so many attempts at true human communication, Wolfe’s characters illuminate the need to face oneself and the world. As his powerful poem “Cumulus” begins, “At a certain point you have to stop running—."
—John Sibley Williams, author of Skin Memory
 
Jesse Wolfe's collection chisels densely packed feeling into poetic form with a playful hand. Divided into solitude and presence, these poems contain the multitudes among others, meeting in the most mundane of places: in our bodies on planets, mingling and dispersing, insisting on selves even as we resolve into a dew. From stanza to life and back again, you may well discover sounds tucked into hillsides, silences between you and the people around, and in the hours between waking and raveling your self anew.
—Ray Hsu, Author of Anthropy and Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, winner of the Gerald Lampert and Alcuin Awards
 
This wonderful collection offers poems of reflection that travel time and space. By making meaning of our relationships and experiences, these poems examine moments central to our humanity. Wolfe is a talented poet and his skill is on full display in these poems.
—Judy Halebsky Author of Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)