Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella

4.9/5 ( ratings)

A duet that spans the years, Christian Anton Gerard's WILMOT HERE, COLLECT FOR STELLA brings all the joyous, bitter, and mundane moments of a lifetime spent together as it traces the relationship between Wilmot and Stella using a blend of narrative and lyric poems. As Wilmot makes collect call after collect call to the life he used to live, he's forced not only to face himself, but also the tradition of narrative dialogic lovers' sequences as he comes to identify as both a person in the world and a piece of poetry.

“Chronology be damned. Say the most notorious libertine of Restoration England places a phone call to the reigning mistress of Petrarchan address a century earlier. Say she’s his long-suffering wife. Does she accept the charges? You’d better hope so; you’ll miss a world of exorbitant fun if she does not. These poems are as gorgeous a romp as wit and irreverence and masterful craft can make. A jazz musician’s timing, imagination hungry as the ocean and, behind the alter egos and their buffetings, a mind of tempered kindness and a heart for grown-up love. This is a ravishing debut.”
—Linda Gregerson, author of The Selvage and Magnetic North

“Funny, absurd, rollicking, whimsically allusive and sophisticated, Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella is a requited version of Astrophil & Stella and in its literary and cultural mash-ups and marital misprisions is something like The Honeymooners meets The Courtier.”
—Michael Collier, author of An Individual History and The Ledge

“Christian Anton Gerard’s debut collection enacts the obsessive psychological scaffolding of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella—though not the sonnet sequence’s form—in these slyly post-confessional lyrics that dramatize the troubled love of the personae Wilmot and Stella. Gerard’s self-reflexive “he said/she said” dialogic structure frames the bracing self-interrogations of Wilmot, haunted variously by his marital infidelity, paternal legacies, and vexing adolescence. Between Wilmot and Stella, and within Gerard’s fraught and intimate poems, the ‘Ghosts keep us moving.’”
—Anna Journey, author of Vulgar Remedies and If Birds Gather Your Hair For Nesting