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Strung Out Along the Endless Branch

“Wesley Houp has a way of sketching a scene or telling a tale so that the imagined backstory, what isn’t said but lurks just outside the poem’s words, carries the emotion and meaning and keeps resonating. Emily Dickinson said, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant.’ The poems in Strung Out Along the Endless Branch seem to follow that advice. It is a book of poems with its own charmed, often fabulous (in the sense of fable-like) way of evoking and presenting contemporary realities and absurdities, garbled politics, drugs, dangers and divisions of all sorts, but also, the rich particulars, characters, and daily wonders of this world. It is a pointed, yet tender, pasquinade or satire, moving, thought provoking, insightful, funny, heartbreaking.” -Greg Pape

About the Author

Wesley Houp was born and raised in High Bridge and Wilmore, Kentucky. He received a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and taught undergraduate and graduate English courses for over 20 years in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, in addition to serving as Writing Center Director at several universities. For the better part of the last decade, he has worked for Tennessee State Parks. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Black Warrior Review, Chattahoochee Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, and Good River Review. His scholarly work in literacy education and pedagogy has appeared in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and Teaching English in the Two-Year College among others. This volume, his first, won the inaugural James Baker Hall Book Award for Poetry in 2024. He currently lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee with his wife, Laura and their daughter and son, Chloe and Henry.

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