Wandering In All Directions of This Earth, a poetry collection and two-time Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize finalist by Writing alumna Loisa Fenichell ’23, was published by Ghost Peach Press last month.
Fenichell’s new collection is concerned with journeys both internal and external. Many of the poems center around themes of loneliness and connection as well as what constitutes the rural and urban and how we inwardly move from space to space. Wandering In All Directions of This Earth was also selected as the winner of the 2022 Ghost Peach Press poetry prize by Yale Younger Poets prize winner Eduardo C. Corral.
“The sentences in Loisa Fenichell’s aptly named Wandering In All Directions Of This Earth enact a journey at once outward and inward, an odyssey through urban and bucolic spaces, across dreamlike bridges ‘that lead to more bridges,’ backward and forward in time, and deeper into the fathomless self,” says Poetry professor Timothy Donelly '98. “A leg that begins in darkest extremity might pirouette into technicolor whimsy; grief and loneliness give way to a richness of language; and privation and pain find magical answers via metaphor’s deranging escape route from the harshness of the real: ‘I fainted / and convulsed, so found myself a small red boat, / like the booths of a diner, in which to sail away.’”
Eduardo C. Corral writes, “There are many things to admire in Loisa Fenichell’s dazzling first book. The impeccable craft, the caution and the tenderness, the refusal to adhere to one stylistic approach, and the abundance of desires. But it’s the language itself that provides the most resonant pleasures. The language is propulsive and electric, rich with imagery that collapses the gulf between the real and the strange. Language, here, is more than memorable—it’s resplendent, alive. This is a book to be grateful for, this is a book to furiously study.”
Loisa Fenichell’s poetry has previously been nominated for a Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Pushcart Prize. She has also received the 2021 Bat City Review Editors’ Prize, and was a finalist for Narrative Magazine’s 2021 30 Below contest as well as the Dorianne Laux/Joe Millar prize. Her work can be read or is forthcoming in the Washington Square Review, The Iowa Review, Guernica Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Currently, Fenichell is completing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver.
Wandering In All Directions of The Earth is available for preorder here.
