Sidebrow Books, paperback
Publication Date: September 2026
Publisher Marketing:
Joshua Marie Wilkinson closes out his No Volta pentology with a dream-like, sleep-lurking journey through Bad Woods, where past volumes mix with imagination’s lonely obsessions and whatever dormant debris the shadow dragger pulls ashore. Here, a questioning voice, half-aligned, re-enters memories within these woods that begin and end you, a “peaceful set of lies called living.” Once again we encounter the courier and the slasher, selves the poet ditches in the presence of the mystery of how pain customizes the self — and how we confuse pain with healing to better armor ourselves. “But why did it end? / Because I’d said that it had to.” Shadowy and tilted, Bad Woods builds on and moves on from the four volumes that preceded it, providing “the approximation of an ending” that only a poem “spun from an inherited hex, a visitant / to muddle the words out through you” can: “So, should we go back? / No. / No turn, no volta, no nothing.”
