[11/01/26] Wilkerson, Joshua: The Keeper

Ugly Duckling Presse, paperback

Publication Date: November 1, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

Joshua Wilkerson’s book-length prose poem The Keeper centers on a dissolved identity, a life-altering accident, and the itinerant preceding years. A series of (mis-)translations of Fernando Pessoa’s poems—particularly those of his “heteronym” Alberto Caeiro—punctuate the text, which maps infrastructures of disintegration onto questions of selfhood, friendship, and home.

"Like stepping into an industrial river—narcotic, caressing, bitter, unrelenting—Joshua Wilkerson’s The Keeper is a practice of slow transport. The mood: being lost, infinitely so. The materials: sunflowers, Houston, Jo-Ann Fabrics. The method: manyness—translation and memoir, the broken sentence and the whole. The arrival: it takes us from the factless sludge into a place of 'scent / and branches.'” —Toby Altman

"Is this silence or drilling? Joshua Wilkerson’s recombinant, shifting, translations of Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro wind and shift, and butt up against, extraction economies and shipping logistics, over instant messenger and on Anki. Like the shifting sign of the sunflower, the poems here drift and double back, widening and closing the gap between languages, as the central impossibility of translation transmutes into the central impossibility of personhood, or as Pessoa writes, the reflective vest. As Caeiro, Pessoa, and Mário de Sá-Carneiro are refracted through Wilkerson’s shifting, lucid forms, the reader is refracted into a waking dream of empty strip malls and freeways. Thanks to Wilkerson, we’re all doing the Pessoa não." —Terrence Arjoon