July Westhale
July Westhale is an essayist, translator, and the award-winning author of Trailer Trash and Via Negativa, which Publishers Weekly called "stunning" in a starred review. Her most recent work can be found in McSweeney’s, The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Huffington Post, among others. She also has an inventively-named collection of salty chapbooks. When she’s not teaching, she works as a co-founding editor of PULP Magazine. www.julywesthale.com
How lucky we are, to experience the world through July Westhale in these new poems! Westhale’s voice is a soft and powerful searchlight on the page, brushing over the moon, Santiago, the window sill, and the reader with rhythm and precision. Its own superbloom of aubades and nocturnes, bright news of gladiolas is bright news indeed.
—Leah Horlick, author of For Your Own Good and Moldovan Hotel
bright news of gladiolas is a tuning fork, resonating with the electricity of gas stations and underpasses, “the tectonic malaise of boulevards.” July Westhale’s collection is awash in petaled wonder, a “super bloom” of unfolding wisdom and vulnerability. Journeying through California and Montana, rich and arid landscapes, their unabashed poems are “headlights on rural roads when the deepest night turns.” Westhale praises saguaros and citrus fruit in equal measure, their images radiate with strange power. The poems in this collection leave us simultaneously destabilized and riddled with hope, they emit haloes of something bigger than us. Westhale’s lyrics are “beaming and resplendent and prismatic—” “I want to touch them.”
—Rage Hezekiah, author of Stray Harbor and Unslakable
Read a review of “bright news of gladiolas” on Harbor Review by Cameron Morse.