Wonder Wheel

Chelsea Whitton’s debut poetry collection, Wonder Wheel, dexterously whirls in sonic circles, ruminating on themes of spiritual bestowal and terrestrial bequest, millennial identity, adult friendship, feminine desire, and the mythmaking at stake in family history. Disoriented speakers who nevertheless believe they know where they are going, and what they are doing, provide an occasion for lyric expansiveness and periodic bathos, including elegies for June Carter Cash, Patsy Cline, the author’s father, an ex-cat, and others. At the heart of the collection is a rhyming sonnet crown that offers a wicked inversion of the book’s larger vision by constructing an apocalyptic mythology of matrilineal inheritance reliant on resistance, destruction, and martyrdom as much as on cycles of creation and healing.