Who Follow the Gleam

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.

"This is poetry as incantation, poetry that sounds far better than most contemporary poetry allows itself to."—Harvard Review"Wessels catches gleams to follow not only in magical tales but in twinkling memories, sparkling wordplay, the films of silver-screen star Veronica Lake, and his charm of a daughter, the inspiration of a half-dozen poems that take their titles from spells."—Literary Hub"Like a poetry equivalent of Herzog's films. An incantatory weave, a confrontation with the self, an earnestness unafraid of irony. This book is a gorgeous mixture. A song."—Jesse Nathan, author of Eggtooth"I'll dare call this book of poetry tremendous. That word, rooted in trembling or shaking, fits the book's central emotion of awe. It also fits how Wessels shakes up expectation with nervy feats of imagination, encompassing various fables and animals, castles and Burger Kings, family stories and cosmic enigmas."—Robert Pinsky, author of Proverbs of Limbo"Christian Wessels' first book of poetry gives a version of ordinary life that is deepened and enchanted by a web of language, by the power of repetition and refrain, and by the intricacies of formal invention. The voices in Who Follow the Gleam bespeak the present's dreariness and magic alike: the Black Forest is an actual place and the place of myth, and every ordinary vista has the capacity to open onto fairy tale. Yet Wessels' power to enchant is the poet's power, not the mage's: there's no promise of a happy ending here, no cure-all spell. Instead, this work is insistently self-aware and self-critical, tinged with charm and melancholy, reflecting back the work of loving and remembering and parenting and inhabiting a body in this world, our world—lush, gorgeous, darkly shimmering, and real."—Lindsay Turner, author of The Upstate"Who Follow the Gleam is a sweeping and intimate hymn to the world through its multifarious texts, landscapes, histories and human relationships. The poems move between humor and loving attention, with a serious and searching gaze. Poems that resonate in the chthonic Black Forests of German fairytales, still root in a vividly present world. The past and present suspend, and we feel here the autobiography of fairytale making a fairytale of autobiography. Each turn exposes the importance of a kind of history—linked to both the uncanny and the factual, letting a passed-down Knowing speak to the contemporaneous human condition."—Bianca Stone, author of The Near and Distant World

• Sympathetic Magic from the Black ForestThe American TowerSpell for a FriendVision from a Three-Eyed CodReanimation Spell in a Brine JarAgainst BirdsBlack Forest AnachronismVague and Impure Things*Pilgrim HotelNatural QuestionsHealing Charm for the End of the DayTwo Spells for the Weathering RindA Green NightHypnosisLittle Ice Age*Our SnailIn the Blue CasinoGesualdo, in Five VoicesLevitation CharmBlack Forest OmenIn Hölderlin's Tower*Frog Lessons for LolaCliff Diving in the Nature PreserveThe Master ArboristSetauket MallardsKelp ForestKaspar HauserAcknowledgments