The Wild Delight of Wild Things

Although grief is at the forefront of these poems, The Wild Delight of Wild Things is a simple love letter to Turner’s late wife, poet Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016).

The poems are also a love letter to our planet during the ongoing sixth mass extinction. Intertwining this immense grief, Turner explores the hybrid borderlands of genre, and the meditations on love and loss blur the boundaries between poetry and lyric prose. In Italian, the word “stanza” is rooted in the word “room.”

And so, stanza by stanza, room by room, page by page, we draft ourselves forward into the imagination, our arms filled with all that we can carry from the days gone by. This is the art of survival. Profound grief teaches us how to dwell in the house of memory–that vibrant temporal landscape of the past–where we might live with the dead we love once more.