By Wendy Videlock
In Wise to the West, Wendy Videlock embraces her Western terrain and surroundings—family, neighbor, barbershop, morning shower, coyote, badger, wolf, blackbird, hawk, canyon, mesa, mountain—with songs, odes, witticisms, lamentations. Along the way, she tilts toward the grand view of the world around—relaying turns of uncertainty or affirmation, history or the latest news, myths and the mystic—and gifting us musings and meditations in her unique style full of quirks, wit, wisdom, and surprising turns. In Wise to the West, Videlock delivers yet another inspired and delightful collection.
Here in the west, whatever one’s pain, one never complains about the rain. What’s good for the plains is bad for harvest. What freezes in spring is sugar-beet borrowed. The river depletes. The groves expire. What blooms in summer is wildfire.
[Videlock’s] craft is worthy. Her delicate turning of a line is as breathtaking as it is brief. — Jeffrey P. Beck, Borderlands
The wordplay is irresistible. — Ann Drysdale, The Shit Creek Review
She has a playfulness with the language and an undeniable wit that makes her work rather difficult not to enjoy. — Marissa Fox, Gadfly Online
At play in the spacious fields of her wit and down to earthiness. — Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews
Just as one can walk into a room in an art gallery, see a painting for the first time and immediately recognize it as a Van Gogh or a Cezanne, one immediately knows when one is reading Videlock. — Jeremy Telman, Valparaiso Review
Wendy Videlock lives on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies with her husband and their assorted critters. Her work appears in Hudson Review, Oprah Magazine, Poetry, Dark Horse, the New York Times, Best American Poetry, and other venues. Her books are available from Able Muse Press, and her upcoming collection of essays and haibun, The Poetic Imaginarium: A Worthy Difficulty (Lithic Press), will appear in mid-2022.
