Julia Thacker
The granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner, Julia Thacker was raised in Dayton Ohio. She first came to Massachusetts as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Corporation of Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic and Pleiades. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th anniversary issue of Poetry International. Julia has taught writing at Tufts University, Radcliffe Seminars and as poet-in-residence in public schools throughout the state. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount. She lives outside of Boston.
You can visit Julia’s website by clicking here
To Wildness
by Julia Thacker
Pub: Mar. 11, 2025
Winner - 19th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
foreword by the judge, Paul Muldoon
In recipes, spells, odes and elegies, To Wildness conjures what has been lost and what remains. These are poems of the body. They rub up against one another and knock elbows. Plum Jam calls preserving fruit as spiritual labor: To be elbow deep in a barrel/arms gloved crimson. In this collection, the dead reside alongside the living. Ancestors roost in trees, having forgotten language, their coats inside out. Others sulk in the eaves, their ears clogged with clover. The past made vivid renders an extravagant present and offers a balm to the isolation of the contemporary world.
What People Are Saying
“Teeming with image, sensation and sound, the poems in To Wildness tumble us into a glorious exuberance of catalog and character, rural landscape and dark imaginings (‘We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plums / when he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.’). Ancestral voices speak from the grave; fabulist figures like the girl buried with a finch tell their stories; and contemporary ghosts only the narrator sees abound (‘Let me touch them as they pass’). A southern gothic atmosphere hovers here: shapes twisting in the dark and the language to conjure them near. What a rich and thrilling collection!”
— Joan Houlihan, It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest
“To Wildness is wildly alive—inventive and spunky and all over the map: from Bigfoot to Xanax to persimmons to Anna Karenina. In ‘When he said Sell a book, I heard Sail,’ the speaker confesses that she ‘wanted to hold the sky like a bowl, smudge the clouds. / Bring a sentence to its knees.’ That she does—and more!”
— Ellen Doré Watson, pray me stay eager
Excerpts
Braid Him into the Earth
Knee-high coffin of wicker, earth-boat floating through the woods.
Wrap him in heather, the old way. Hold a pocket mirror under his nose.
Say of him what we say of fathers.
If one of you has a three-string, then a tune.
Boots, stamp away spirits. If the ground is frozen,
dig shallow, spade ringing through ice, shale, mica-shine.
Lower the basket in a tangle of ginseng root, because I can't.
Let well water seep into crevices, mineral, like nickels
on the tongue. Skin freckling in feldspar, beetle, slug.
If flood waters drift the body loose, let him not be found by a child.
Let bones wash up with clay pipes, beads, thumb-size skulls.
Let them whiten and scatter in blond fields.
Julia Thacker
God Denies Any Knowledge of Dead Angel in His Bed
He searches Heaven's cabinets for a hangover cure.
Combs knotted stars from his beard.
Sets the morning agenda. To the blind shepherd
he dictates a note: The wind is blue.
And what of tsunamis, wars?
Macedonian wells infested with bees?
God has a headache. His hands tremble.
He cannot look at the heap of sheets,
her celestial body, marcelled bob, cold
in his chamber. No one understands
that he is full of duende. Not the swarm of angels,
their platinum regiment rapping
at his windows, rattling doors, voices sharp
and clear, Why? God covers his ears.
Julia Thacker