The Sisters
Black Ocean, 2024
A lyric meditation on childhood, adulthood, parenting, grief, fear, and joy, The Sisters is a book of prose poems that began as bedtime stories. A kaleidoscopic invocation of imagined lives, these poems transform familiar myths, fables, and fairy tales into whimsical worlds that are a bit more fragile and bit more true.
Through a series of prose poems, and complementary, hand-drawn illustrations by sculptor and visual artist, Deanna Dorangrichia, The Sisters confronts what it means to raise children and grow up amid climate catastrophes, insistent threats of gender-based violence, and the shocks of late-stage capitalism. These are ethereal and eerie stories full of torn edges, a series of dazzling lullabies that will soothe you awake.
“Windholz’s elegant, imaginative prose poems are mesmerizingly spectral—not like a ghost but like a spectrum of light.”
“Jordan Windholz’s second book, a collection of prose poems about the two sisters of the title, offers elegant, poetic tales that echo aspects of the bedtime story but end up on the other side of Aesop and Grimm, in the imaginative spaces reserved for grown-up poets with a taste for Calvino and Pessoa.”
Other Psalms
Winner of the 2015 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry
University of North Texas Press, 2015
In his debut collection, Jordan Windholz recasts devotional poetics and traces the line between faith and its loss. Other Psalms gives voice to the skeptic who yet sings to the silence that “swells with the noise of listening.” If faith is necessary, this collection suggests, it is necessary as material for its own unmaking.Without a doubt, these are poems worth believing in, announcing, as they do, a new and necessary voice in American poetry.
“Ambitious and exigent, these poems are refreshingly alert to all of the formal necessities of contemporary poetry, recognizing the inadequacy of any single measure to encompass the human longing for presence.”
“Jordan Windholz’s Other Psalms harmonizes reverie and reverence.”