WHEN NOTHING WILD REMAINS - poetry by Gerald Wagoner

Publication Date: September 15, 2023

Paperback, 60 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-48-6

$22.50 retail, $16.50 from publisher

“We come here to ask what is intact.” From his vantage now in Brooklyn, Gerald Wagoner looks out across miles and years to the northwestern states where he spent his early years, recalling “That look / I grew up with. A certain tribe / of chiseled face white people who stuck it out, / digging, planting, cutting, tending the pioneer story.” In the 130 years since historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed, Americans have struggled to come to terms with the changing realities of a national identity forged in openness and wild places, places like those where Wagoner grew up. “Nothing here that’s not America,” he writes; but increasingly these are places where towns like Twodot, Montana no longer exist except in memory and imagination. In his closing title poem he wonders “what will happen / to our places of renewal after the rich buy / all the mountains and nothing wild remains.” This is no mere exercise in nostalgia, but rather an effort at a necessary reckoning, both personal and national.

Praise for Gerald Wagoner & When Nothing Wild Remains

Gerald Wagoner is a poet of uncanny particulars: “The child, as man, remembers the tang and texture of warm / summer apricots picked from / a tree that was never there.” The poems in When Nothing Wild Remains are “on speaking terms with the wind,” rich in imagery of a rural America he knows intimately. With him, readers revisit the ranches, back roads, reservations, and fishing holes of his Pacific northwest childhood, alive in the color, depth and intensity of “green days of night colder than never known” and “bars packed with longhaired women who / cast daredevil lures in their wanton wakes.” Wagoner’s graphic poetry is cinematic and sobering in its frank depictions of what’s missing, the wildness of a remembered past as seen in the light of an ongoing present.

—Elaine Sexton, author of Drive

In Gerald Wagoner’s powerful new book, When Nothing Wild Remains, he recalls the disquiet and desperation of rundown towns and troubled lives in the American Northwest of his youth—Montana and eastern Oregon. Somewhat in the style of his old mentor, Richard Hugo, he writes tight, compressed, imagistic lyrics, expertly controlled in rhythm and idiom, and the tone is often somber in its examination of these downtrodden places with bars and cafes full of the terminally disappointed. Displaying a wide range of lyric forms – from pantoums and sonnets, to tightly controlled free verse – Wagoner approaches his subject matter in both simple and complex ways, sometimes offering crisp narratives with a clear through-line, and at other times, complicating his scenes with assertions and asides, disjunctive time-frames, and destabilizing perspectives. Or as he describes it elsewhere: “a tangential angle of intersection, an obliquity…/ A vector painfully acute and openly obtuse.” Whatever the style, Gerald Wagoner conjures broken commitments and tenuous connections, remembering it as he can from an adult vantage, coming back to it, sometimes physically, sometimes in memory, for the triage and rescue missions that art can provide.

—Neil Shepard, author of How It Is: Selected Poems

Gerald Wagoner brings his talents as a visual artist and sculptor to the poetic enterprise, crafting lines that satisfy the ear and eye as they take form (and place) against the white page. Describing the house of his childhood, returned to sixty years later, Wagoner finds “(i)ts roof and porch square enough, but not, / like the yard’s slouched weeping cedar, true.” Memory, like art, yields its own truths, and there are many to be found in the negative spaces Wagoner negotiates. These poems bring to mind Edward Hopper’s deeply American sense of distance and disquiet.

—Hilary Sideris, author of Liberty Laundry

About the Author

Gerald Wagoner’s childhood was divided between Eastern Oregon and Montana where he was raised under the doctrine of benign neglect. With a BA in Creative Writing, Gerald pursued the art of sculpture, and eventually left the Northwest for New York. Along the way he earned an MFA in sculpture from SUNY Albany, then moved to Brooklyn in 1982. Gerald exhibited regularly and taught Art and English for the NYC Department of Education. When he was at last able to plan for retirement, he decided to accept the challenge of the poet’s life.

Publications (selected): Right Hand Pointing, Ocotillo Review, BigCityLit, The Lake, Coffin Bell, J-Journal, Blue Mountain Review, Night Heron Barks, Maryland Literary Review, October Hill Magazine, Shot Glass, The Umbrella Factory, The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Cathexis Northwest Press.

2018: Visiting Poet Residency: Brooklyn Navy Yard.

2019: Installation and poetry reading event, The Tides Of Time, Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse.

2021/2023: Created and hosted the summer outdoor poetry reading series A Persistence of Cormorants.