The Well by Glen P. Vecchione

The Well is a major poem, one that sets forth with the kind of profound intentions that are rare in today’s poetry—think of the physical and moral landscape of Robinson Jeffers, the nakedness before fate of Greek tragedy—and achieves its aims splendidly, revealing Glen Vecchione as a poet equal to this daunting task he has accepted for his art. The Well‘s accomplishment lies not so much in the story that it tells, although told masterfully, as in the tenuous hope it offers that form, be it social or poetic, might contain human violence and elemental chaos. Inside this “hellscape / of charred cottonwood and hourglass-shaped eddies / thick with the down-fruiting of dandelion purr,” it is the illuminant gravity of Vecchione’s language that gives us grounding and possibility, then in the inevitable desire to read again.

–James Owens, author of “Mortalia” and “Family Portrait with Scythe”

A short story’s not a squashed novel and a poem’s not an abbreviated story, but Glen Vecchione’s compressed episodic sequence of poems, The Well, tells a tale worthy of Poe or Robinson Jeffers—gothic, haunting, and weird, in the best sense of that word. The silences that surround it are filled with implication. In terms of scale and implication, the well in question may be shallow, but what it gives comes from a considerable depth.

–Robert Wrigley, author of “The True Account of Myself as a Bird”

Glen Vecchione’s narrative poem, The Well, set in the American Midwest sometime in the early twentieth century, is visceral, carnal, and mythic. The poem employs five traditional forms in its telling, including sestina rigida and pantoum, to create dream-like hypnotic repetitions of key words and phrases that conjure a rhythmic, miasmic horror never explicitly revealed but impossible to dismiss. It is a haunting, masterful performance.

–Edison Jennings, author of “Intentional Fallacies”