One Morning

"[Wolff’s poems] are stylistic and tonal shapeshifters. Hip, contemplative, and dark and resistant to the hunky-dory, the New Agey, and the prescriptive, they’re unnerving, funny, and occasionally subversive."—Bookforum

Poet, novelist, and Fence Books founder Rebecca Wolff’s internal monologue made external in poetry is uncanny. Her musical and darkly funny fourth collection,One Morning—, spans language, culture, art history, love, passion, grief, consumerism, environmental devastation, and the ekphrastic experience of pop and high culture. She experiments with torque, energy, narrative—two steps ahead of herself with the reader on her heels.

From "Today Is a Good Day to Fly (Life Begins at)":

I’m really digging this blue sky
after so much rain
with my regular menstrual

cycle
my Def Jam

progesterone cream
the blow-in (in my pocket)
(ripped out)

from in-flight music magazine
"touching cloth"
like the Romantics do.
Insert jitney.

Rebecca Wolff is the author of four collections of poetry, one novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose. Her first book,Manderley, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky. Her second,Figment, was selected for the Barnard Women Poets Prize by Claudia Rankine and Eavan Boland. Her third,The King, was published by W. W. Norton in 2009. Her novel The Beginnerswas published by Riverhead in 2011. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts. In 1998, Wolff founded the influential literary journalFence; in 2001 she founded Fence Books and launched The Constant Criticwebsite. Wolff lives in Hudson, New York, and is currently a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.