A01=Christian Wessels
American poems with folklore themes
American poet's reckoning with myth
ancestral tales in present day poetry
and moss as poetic characters
and transformation
animals
atmospheric poetry collection
Author_Christian Wessels
Black Forest legends in modern verse
Black Forest poetry
blending myth and the everyday
books like Ocean Vuong
burning hotel imagery
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childhood in poetry
Christian Wessels poet
chromatic casinos and burning hotels imagery
cloud metaphors in poetry
collective memory woven through nature
contemporary American poetry
contemporary nature-infused poetry
contemporary poetry 2025
creative writing debut
cycles of nature and personal myth
cyclical poetry themes
debut poetry collection
dreamlike landscapes in poetry
dreamlike poetry
drifting between otherworldly and familiar
emotional connection to natural world
emotionally resonant poems
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ethereal verse
evolving place in contemporary verse
fatherhood and childhood in lyrical form
first book of poems
for fans of Carl Phillips
generational wisdom and poetic form
German folklore poetry
haunting lyrical voice
immersive poetry
indie poetry release
introspective poems
introverted characters fiction
intuition and change in poetic narrative
literary poetry readers
literature and intuition
Long Island Sound poems
Long Island Sound poetic imagery
lyrical poetry book
magical creatures in current poetry
magical language poetry
magical realism in poetry collections
magical realism poetry
meditation on place
meditative verse
modern mythopoesis
modern poetic narrative
modern poetry collection
moody poetry collection
moss and stone in verse
mystical poetry
myth and memory
mythic landscapes poetry
mythical creatures and natural elements
narrative poetry of history and magic
natural world in poetry
nature as character in poetry
nature as conduit for personal story
nature-infused poetry
origins and personhood in lyric poetry
patterns of dream and folklore
personhood in verse
place and memory in American poetry
poems about memory
poems crossing history and geography
poems set in casinos
poetic exploration of change and self
poetic folklore studies
poetic meditation on identity
poetic meditations on future and self
poetic storytelling
poetic structure and intuition
poetic tales and myths
poetic voice and identity
poetry about fatherhood
poetry about identity
poetry blending folklore
poetry debut 2025
poetry exploring family
poetry for dreamers
poetry inspired by myth
poetry MFA graduate
poetry that bends time
power of passed-down knowledge
reimagined legends in America today
small press poetry
spellbinding poetry
spells and mythology in modern poems
spiritual resonance of landscapes
sun
sun as metaphor
surrealist poems
symbolism in sun and clouds
time
trade poetry book
uncanny in literature
uncanny lyricism in debut poetry
Who Follow the Gleam book
Product details
- ISBN 9781625349262
- Weight: 172g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 03 Apr 2026
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
Christian Wessels is a poet, essayist, and critic. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Cortland Review, and Harvard Review Online, among other journals. His criticism has appeared in Literary Imagination, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cleveland Review of Books. He is a visiting assistant professor of poetry at the University of Rochester. He splits his time between New York and the Black Forest of Germany.
