"Board Book & the Costume of a Whooping Crane"
from David Wojahn's
Interrogation Palace:
New and Selected Poems 1982-2004

David Wojahn:

David Wojahn is professor of English and director of creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, and Icehouse Lights. Wojahn is the recipient of numerous awards including three Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Book Award, and the George Kent Memorial Prize. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. (Photo by Noelle Watson)

About Interrogation Palace:

"Interrogation Palace shows that David Wojahn has been faithful to his vision. Never afraid of the arcane and experimental, he somehow keeps both feet in this world and propels us through an inner sanctum of angels and rock music, soothsayers and popular history, and philosophers and postmodern mystery. At the heart of Wojahn's poetry is the raw data of pain and joy. This wonderful poet knows how to conjure laughter through a witty, earthy language."
— Yusef Komunyakaa

"The astonishing impact of Interrogation Palace marks off David Wojahn as a formal innovator, a poet that every poet of whatever generation needs to read, and needs to read now: as erudite as any of the Moderns, but much wilder in his range of reference, his deeply felt and wonderfully intelligent poems meld the political and personal in a way that is unparalleled by any living American poet."
— Tom Sleigh

"This is a book of journeys into the night-towns and underworlds of personal failure and loss as well as public tragedy and travesty. Few poets display such formal dexterity and invention while so free of trifles as David Wojahn. In extraordinary and weighty collocations that plunge the heart, these poems refuse easy consolation; they wander among ruins and ghosts in ways we would not be wrong to call heroic."
— Dean Young

"After September 11th, one of the first living poets I thought of was David Wojahn: someone who could follow our tragedy to its grave depths, with dignity and unsparingness, and egolessness, and who would stay with it — and us — as long as need be. For life. His poetry is, as Norman Dubie has said, the poetry of conscience; and here, at the birth of our new century, we are grateful."
— Jean Valentine on Spirit Cabinet

"Wojahn proves himself a master of the narrative poem, extending his range here with expertly fashioned dramatic monologues and quirky, rhythmic sonnets."
— Publishers Weekly on Mystery Train

"The holes in the poet's life are filled with smart, terrifying poems... the result is a stirring, anguished book, revealing of the poet's grief and emblematic of its cost."
— The New Yorker on The Falling Hour

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