To Wildness

Available March 11, 2025

“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.”

—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.”

—Ellen Doré Watson, pray me stay eager

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. Additionally, she has been the recipient of fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute. Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review and The New Republic. 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.

Little Black Dress

 

Puddled at my feet or ruched
to the waist, how easily I shimmied
in and out of you, flicked cigarette ash,
tiny embers, from your bodice, spilled
drinks like rain. You lent style, seriousness.
Unzipped in vans, nests of quilts,
Persian carpets (rug burns on my back),
balled-up skin of a selkie. Wingless, plucked,
plumed, aroma of fig pudding, squid ink.
Moths have made a feast of you.
Where is the night we slept on the beach,
the morning after, cloud-crusted, glittered
with sand. Give me back the barefoot
sky, tin bucket clattered with shells.

First published by Plume. See more of Julia’s selected writing.