“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
