Wedding Pulls

The title of J.K. Daniels’s first book, Wedding Pulls, comes from a Victorian custom that persists in the American South: charms pulled from a wedding cake by the unmarried attendants are said to predict who will marry next and who never, who will be richer and who poorer. Sensual and sonically-charged, these poems interrogate what it means to be wedded, lawfully or not, and to have and hold, or not, until death do us part. In personas from Eurydice to Eve to Alice B. Toklas, the poems complicate the traditional notions, the “meager plot,” of marriage and family while exploring the enduring pull of intimacy. Inspired by Shakespeare and Stein, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Harryette Mullen, these witty poems riff on art and myth, and the fate that is family.

Wedding Pulls is the winner of the 2015 New Southern Voices Poetry Book Prize.