Trigonometry/Olduvai
About the book
Finishing Line Press (2013)
This prose poem chapbook brings together fifteen years of occasional work in the prose poem form—one I have always loved, and that has kept me in touch with the essence of writing even more than fiction has.
What writers say
“Steven Wingate’s poems read like screams from fallen angels disgusted to find themselves mucking around on the muddy, hopeless earth. His dark multiplicity of images creates the chilling, fantastical and otherworldly spirit of a Hieronymus Bosch painting filtered through a 21st century intellect. “When the last of those teachers has perished we will be swept from this earth and deposited at the farthest extremities of the universe, useless even to ourselves and unfit for any cause save destruction.” Wingate writes like that last teacher howling lessons into the “farthest extremities of the universe,” while the dark winds wipe the slate clean.”
—Peter Conners, author of Growing Up Dead and Of Whiskey and Winter
“Wingate’s is the voice of a 21st Century Jeremiah, fist raised against our corrupt milieu, heckling the multitudes who sustain it. But to say only this is to flatten the nuance that flares in the voice of this supplicant seeker. The strength of his critique resides in his candor about himself. An archetypal everyman, he points out the money lenders’ contradictions and his own, poking the darkness around us and calling out the truth: both devils and winged angels have come bearing this same message.”
—Marilyn Krysl, author of Swear the Burning Vow and Dinner with Osama
Where to get it
Direct from Finishing Line Press.