Writing Your Name on the Glass by Jim Whiteside

Description

Writing Your Name on the Glass reckons with the duration of memory and the peculiarities of the present, tackling what it means to be both beloved and also subject to love’s grasp. Joining the poetics of the queer south, Jim Whiteside furthers the conversation about identity, place, and desire in contemporary queer relationships. These elegant and precise poems document the process of reassembling broken pieces and finding one’s voice again.

“Jim Whiteside’s poems are full of “un-pinnable, un-cageable” things: a graveyard, a greenhouse, the lover’s body. To say Writing Your Name on the Glass is a moving debut is to consider the motion the poems make: when Whiteside writes of fanblades, we feel both the delicacy of the paper unfurling and the air sharply cut into shape. These are poems to clutch: feathery, fighting and bright.” —Beth Bachmann, author of CEASE.

“Jim Whiteside’s poems chronicle the mysteries of self and world, rendering the uncanny beauty of what fades and what persists. A book of ‘the broken body,’ Writing Your Name on the Glass explores love and desire in all its conflict and complexity, fusing longing and loss into poems that are fiercely delicate, ‘a lost gospel / preaching wildness.'” —Bruce Snider, author of Paradise, Indiana.

“Intensely lyrical and fiercely loving, the poems in Jim Whiteside’s chapbook Writing Your Name on the Glass convey the ache of desire and the tension of passion and restraint in a manner both classical and contemporary. With a precision of imagery, action, and music, Whiteside crafts every line right. These vivid and memorable poems introduce a powerful new voice in American letters.” —Stuart Dischell, author of Children with Enemies.

Jim Whiteside

Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019), and was recently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His poems have received support from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vanderbilt University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he earned his MFA.

Jim’s recent poems have appeared or will soon appear in publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Best New Poets, AGNI, 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, and Boston Review. He is currently at work on a full-length collection of poems.

His first opera libretto, Higher Ground, was scored by the composer Jules Pegram and debuted at The University of Michigan in April 2018.

Originally from Cookeville, Tennessee, he has taught literature and writing courses at Stanford University, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and through various nonprofits and organizations. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.