Eleanor Rand Wilner | Counterbalance Arts

Eleanor Rand Wilner is the author of five books of poetry, including The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon), a translation of Euripides’ Medea, and a critical book on visionary imagination. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Juniper Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. She holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, serves as a contributing editor to CALYX, and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

“A poet of visionary amplitude and revolutionary intelligence.” – Alicia Ostriker

“Eleanor Wilner can sing and think hard at the same time--a rare combination. She is first-rate, and it's fitting that she will be reading for the classy Counterbalance series, which is serious about excellence.” – Marvin Bell

“Eleanor Wilner is one of the finest poets writing in the U.S.A. today. Her body of work is non pareil, distinguished by her intense musicality, sharply honed intelligence and a sweeping vision.” – Sam Hamill

The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

by Eleanor Rand Wilner

In this “choral work of the imagination,” Wilner’s poems reach beyond the self to challenge popular assumptions, rigorously question beliefs, and unsettle memory itself. As the old gods dissolve back into elemental forces and passions, a contemporary vision emerges that looks back without nostalgia, views the present with mounting dread, and mixes elegy with protest against that which devalues life and sanctions violence and war.

Otherwise

by Eleanor Rand Wilner

Eleanor Wilner loosens the attachments of traditional figures to the old historical ground and sets them free—to suggest how it might have been otherwise, and might still be. This is the most important book yet from the acclaimed poet and MacArthur prize winner. “In a book of poems, one is happy to find half a dozen remarkable performances—poems worth rereading and even committing to memory. In Otherwise—which is splendid from the title on—it would be hard to find half a dozen which failed to equal Wilner’s stratospheric standard.” – David Slavit, Seven Arts (Note: Hardcover edition issued without dust-jacket.)

"This Straw and Manure World"

by Eleanor Wilner

Broadside created by Paul Hunter/Wood Works Press for the poet’s reading for Counterbalance Poetry on Wednesday, October 24, 2007. Printed from hand-set metal type on archival paper with original woodcut. Limited to 180 copies.