Blue | signed

The title poem of “Blue” is a 2024 Pushcart Prize winner.

The entirety of Blue is wrought with both tenderness and anguish, hope and helplessness, and, above all, honesty and vulnerable love. — Emilee Kinney, MAYDAY Magazine

With each poem in Blue, Erin Wilson births and re-births what it is to mother—from the years of innocence and hide-and-seek, to the terror of raising a teen consumed with depression. She takes what is most raw, most vulnerable, most undone, and brings it to the page with precision and gem-like perfection. Intimate. Tormented. Urgent. Tender. Infused with primal love. These are poems that tell the truth. I was hypnotized by Blue. — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Hush and Naked for Tea

Invigorating, inventive, and remarkably honest, Blue sparks from “only the suggestion of a few bones” “a strong urge to know / each magnificent unraveling spire in pure light.” These poems tell the story of a life at risk of spilling over the edge of the page, capturing the magnitude of a restless, relentless search for both wound and healing. These are poems born of a kind of wrought faith that, despite all the breaking, language still might bring us closer to each other, and closer to ourselves. Wilson has given us a heady, intoxicating experience, a fascinating collision of tradition and innovation, all exquisitely layered in self, art, tenderness, and a rich testament to the ever-present need for risk and empathy. — John Sibley Williams, As One Fire Consumes Another and Skin Memory

These poems are startling and joyful at once… With such daring, Wilson illuminates a universe that hurts us to see. But she accounts for the days in Blue with such humility and restraint that it is a gift. To read this book is first to be saddened, winded, and then to be surprised by joy. — Emily Tristan Jones, editor Columba

Erin Wilson’s Blue is a work of radical worry that brushes over the invisible fossil of location with a verse that paints sons and mothers into corners so sharply that it separates survival and existence long enough that losses grieve differently over the same portion of brevity. I loved this book. For the vague science of its radiance, for its reverse resurrections, for the timestamps its poetry puts on the disorientation of the parent and the parented, for its carrying of a sorrow that remains unpaid by sadness, and, most of all, for trying to keep with color a nothingness from going bad. — Barton Smock, Skin To Skin In An Unmarked Life and Ghost Arson