A01=Christian Wessels
atmospheric poetry collection
Author_Christian Wessels
Black Forest poetry
books like Ocean Vuong
burning hotel imagery
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childhood in poetry
Christian Wessels poet
cloud metaphors in poetry
contemporary American poetry
contemporary poetry 2025
creative writing debut
cyclical poetry themes
debut poetry collection
dreamlike poetry
emotionally resonant poems
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ethereal verse
first book of poems
for fans of Carl Phillips
German folklore poetry
haunting lyrical voice
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introverted characters fiction
literary poetry readers
literature and intuition
Long Island Sound poems
lyrical poetry book
magical language poetry
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moss and stone in verse
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poems about memory
poems set in casinos
poetic folklore studies
poetic meditation on identity
poetic storytelling
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poetic tales and myths
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poetry about fatherhood
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poetry blending folklore
poetry debut 2025
poetry exploring family
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sun as metaphor
surrealist poems
trade poetry book
uncanny in literature
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.
