Persea Books / “The Survival Expo”“THE SURVIVAL EXPO” by Caki Wilkinson (Persea Books, 72 pages, $16).
In “The Survival Expo,” poet Caki Wilkinson guides us through an exploration of what it means to survive our past without leaving it altogether, observing it from within but also with newfound perspective. From high school exes “who hung moons / in notebook margins truant afternoons,” to the many Elvises of Graceland, the collection is brimming with characters who offer a glimpse of American life and all the ways we have to stay alive.
A former instructor at the University of the South and a staff member of the Sewanee Writers Conference, Wilkinson directs the creative-writing program at Rhodes College in Memphis and has published two previous books of poetry, “Circles Where the Head Should Be” (2011) and “The Wynona Stone Poems” (2015). She answered questions from Chapter 16 via email:
Q: The character Hope is an important presence in these poems. Is she autobiographical?
A: Hope is a character based on a couple of women from my life, but the sequence as a whole is more interested in a particular kind of relationship than in any one story. There are autobiographical elements for sure, but I’m usually coming in slant, changing some of the facts in order to get closer to the truth. In general, I need a little bit of distance to be able to write about the things that matter most to me. I often return to what Flannery O’Connor says about creative distortion and the need to approach a story “as saying something about life colored by the writer, not about the writer colored by life.” I’d argue that’s important for poetry, too.