“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. ”
— Suzanne Buffam
Dear Wallace Book Cover by Author Julie Choffel 
Available now from The Backwaters prize in poetry

Dear 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.

  • “With one part whimsy, one part despair, and a snogger of wry wit, Choffel drops us into the most halcyon disturbance ever to wake the dead.”

    —Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, author of Her Read

  • “These urgent poems enact the realization that the personal is never settled but needs to be discovered anew, line by line. For Choffel, poetry is not the cry but rather the hope laden in the occasion of our humanity. Her work is what listening sounds like.”

    —Richard Deming, author of This Exquisite Loneliness

  • “We readers of poetry are “uncertain animals,” and, lucky for us, Julie Choffel’s poems get caught up in the filmy place between our uncertainty and our animality. Her work has both the delicacy and the ungainly chaos of forms emerging from raw materials curiously moving toward thinghood…”

    —Jared Stanley, author of So Tough

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.