cly, you remember when it was us and the boys
                and mom and dad and we all drove up to
                chincoteague for the summer and the car just
—collapsed—
                 —just broke down, and dad took the hood up
                 and put his head in the engine and hollered
                 for mom to keep turning the key and the sky—
—like fire—
                 —record heat, air-con kaput with the rest
                 and the sun crushing down like a mouthful
                 of lemon peels, like the inside of a deer's gut—
—and castor wouldn't—
                 —wouldn't get out of the car, he was afraid
                 of the snakes, you remember the snakes,
                 buckets of them wiggling around the trees—
—rising up—
                 —leaping up to strike, and i said momma don't
                 you see what's happening, but that's when dad
                 all punked on motor oil snatched up a rock—
—a boulder—
                 —biggest one he could find, and he smashed
                 that thing down on the engine so hard i thought
                 the earth had split, sound like a plane crash—
—like a death—
                 —but damned if that engine didn't roll right
                 over for him, just spread its legs and purred,
                 and there was nothing sweeter than pulling out—
—past the trucks—
                 —past the men, none of whom had stopped
                 to help, and castor, poor kid, didn't he throw up?
                 all over the back seat, smelled like milk and rot—
—all the way to virginia—
                 —all the way to the big house, you remember
                 the hurricane? you remember the hydrangeas,
                 how they looked so bright inside the storm?
from the journal KENYON REVIEW
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This poem, like many in "Helen of Troy, 1993" (Scribner, 2025), creates a palimpsest of modern and mythological violence. It's an imperfectly scraped parchment: when the light hits it just so, ancient hurts flash through the skin.

Maria Zoccola on "Helen of Troy Calls Her Sister"
Headshots of Wendy Call and Shook
A Conversation with Wendy Call and Shook

"I hope that part of what the unique trilingual format of How to Be a Good Savage provides the reader is a sense of the rich spaces between these languages, which have their own distinct, complex sociocultural and historical relationships, too. I don't know if there is a 'depth of meaning' that is impossible to convey, but if you track the various line lengths across languages, you will definitely encounter instances in which equal conciseness seems impossible!"

via LITHUB
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What Sparks Poetry:
Erin Marie Lynch on Reading Prose

"My family's archive was haunting me. Or the archive beneath the archive, the archive against the archive. The archive that could be for us. I was trying to trace the movements of my ancestors backwards, from Oregon to Standing Rock to the Dakota homelands in Minnesota. I needed to find out whether my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth, had been involved in the forced march following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and the following atrocities. And I needed poetry to understand the varied and various rippings and sutures of our people and our land."
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