“Part homage, part rebuke, part domestic cri de coeur, Dear Wallace levels a nervy, philosophical critique at the myth of male genius and the American dream. Supreme fictions be damned. Here are notes towards a subversive, feminist reality. ”
Available now from The Backwaters prize in poetryDear Wallace addresses the poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens in an attempt to reconsider art, power, and creativity amid the demands of everyday responsibility. Exploring relationships between modernism, motherhood, poetry, and privilege, the speaker of these poems puts her daily routines in dialogue with his. Curious, funny, and wry, Choffel confronts Stevens as an unlikely peer who lived and wrote in the same city and weather as she does now, imagining a present-day conversation about the many ways creative practice is informed by social context. As we struggle to marry creative independence with our communal obligations, the questions in these poems are more urgent than ever. Stevens, a proxy for beauty, inventiveness, and legitimacy, becomes an audience for the ennui, anxiety, and politics of care that characterize another kind of writer’s life today.
About Julie
Julie Choffel’s most recent book is Dear Wallace, (forthcoming from The Backwaters/University of Nebraska Press, 2024), which won the Backwaters Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of The Hello Delay (Fordham University Press, 2012), winner of the Poets Out Loud prize, as well as a handful of chapbooks. From 2017 to 2020, she served as Poet Laureate of West Hartford, Connecticut. A graduate of the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass Amherst, she teaches creative writing at the University of Connecticut and lives near Hartford with her family.