Wingless by Zachary Riddle

In Wingless, we soar into  the limitless and fearless vistas of Zachary Riddle‘s imagination. An unflinching, brilliant debut collection of superbly rich, musical, spectral, transcendent lyrics, this book is evidence of a young poet with his heart aimed—beyond the nightmarish film grief’s horror-shadows cast—toward the bright sky.

–Robert Fanning, author of Our Sudden Museum, American Prophet and The Seed Thieves.

From the very first poem we are plunged into the apocalyptic mythology Riddle so masterfully creates, caught in his noir net of memory and agony. There is no escape here. No wings for poet or reader to fly away. We are haunted by his stories of childhood and the death of his mostly absent father. Nightmarish scenes of wolves, forests, bound or severed wings, blood and corpses reappear as if in a horror film, like the films he also writes about in this book. It is a chilling and heartbreaking collection of poems, a vulnerable mind trying to save itself from itself and a terrible reality. “I was born haunted”, Riddle says in one of his compelling poems, and in another “every night I …make space for the ruins of your ghost”. Beware his ghosts. Like his poems, once they enter your mind, they will not let you go for a long, long time.

–Zilka Joseph, author of Sharp Blue Search of Flame, What Dread, and Lands I Live In.

Like the child in the opening poem who watches with fascination a brutally murdered corpse on television, the poems in Zachary Riddle’s Wingless refuse to look away from the horrors of grief and the messy agony of human loss. A sequence of elegies for the speaker’s dead father, this excellent book is shot through with truly frightening images, haunting surrealism, and horror-movie tropes into which Riddle breathes fresh life with finely-tuned language and startling metaphors. When children speak in these poems, they often ask the old, important questions—What happens when we die?—and the adults that people Riddle’s world never offer comforting answers. This book will not comfort you. It will wake you up and keep you up at night. It will teach you much about the ways death, violence, and mourning hold sway over our families, our bodies, and our lives. It is a fierce, unforgettable debut from an important new voice.

–Jeffrey Bean, author of Diminished Fifth, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, The Voyeur’s Litany, and Woman Putting on Pearls.