Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Who Follow the Gleam: Poems

Who Follow the Gleam: Poems

Wessels, Christian

Paperback

Series: Juniper Prize for Poetry

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1625349262
ISBN13: 9781625349262
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: Apr 3 2026
Pages: 108
Weight: 0.37
Height: 0.34 Width: 6.31 Depth: 8.44
Language: English

A dazzling debut that blends folklore with the everyday

Drifting between the past and present, the material and the otherworldly, Who Follow the Gleam melts lore and magic with history to shape distinctive narratives of childhood, fatherhood, and personhood. In his debut poetry collection, Christian Wessels crosses centuries and takes his readers with him to Germany's Black Forest, burning hotels, chromatic casinos, and Long Island's dazing Sound. Uncanny elements of folklore and dreamlike stories are grounded in the atmosphere of the natural world as Wessels turns the sun, moss, and clouds into characters connecting his poems: maybe I myself am the sun; am / the brilliant silence engraved / in stone; am the arc / through which the future becomes / legible.

In the world of this collection, intuition, feelings, dreams, and spells mimic cycles, patterns, rules, and structure as the speaker disappears in the magic of language, only to resurface in the everyday. In four sections, Wessels reckons with a changing world, evolving and sometimes unfamiliar, while coming to terms with the uncertain future: The cloud looks / like me, it looks like me because / the present moves, the present moves. This collection is a sensitive meditation on the power of passed-down knowledge--personal and collective, factual and mythical--and how such knowledge finds its embodiment in the world.

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