A01=Chelsea Whitton
Author_Chelsea Whitton
Category=DCC
Category=DCF
Category=FXD
ekphrastic
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
family inheritance
family narrative
female friendship
first book
folklore
hurricane
June Carter Cash
matriarchy
mermaid parade
millennials
myth
patrilineal
sonnet crown
southern culture
US South
Product details
- ISBN 9780807185872
- Dimensions: 229 x 5mm
- Publication Date: 16 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Chelsea Whitton's debut poetry collection, Wonder Wheel, dexterously whirls in sonic circles, ruminating on themes of spiritual bestowal and terrestrial bequest, millennial identity, adult friendship, feminine desire, and the mythmaking at stake in family history. Disoriented speakers who nevertheless believe they know where they are going, and what they are doing, provide an occasion for lyric expansiveness and periodic bathos, including elegies for June Carter Cash, Patsy Cline, the author's father, an ex-cat, and others. At the heart of the collection is a rhyming sonnet crown that offers a wicked inversion of the book's larger vision by constructing an apocalyptic mythology of matrilineal inheritance reliant on resistance, destruction, and martyrdom as much as on cycles of creation and healing.
Chelsea Whitton is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in many print and online publications including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Copper Nickel, Cimarron Review, and Poetry Ireland, among others. She lives in southwestern Ohio and teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
