Wonder Wheel

Poems

Series: Sewanee Poetry

by Chelsea Whitton

Series edited by Wyatt Prunty and Leigh Anne Couch

88 Pages / 6.00 × 9.00 × 0.21 in

Paperback

9780807185872

Published: 2026-03-16

$20.95

PREORDER

eBook

9780807186398

Published: 2026-03-16

(Requires the Leaf e-Reader app)

$9.95

PREORDER

Description
Authors
Praise
Press Kit

Chelsea Whitton’s debut poetry collection, Wonder Wheel, dexterously whirls in sonic circles, ruminating on themes of spiritual bestowal and terrestrial bequest, millennial identity, adult friendship, feminine desire, and the mythmaking at stake in family history. Disoriented speakers who nevertheless believe they know where they are going, and what they are doing, provide an occasion for lyric expansiveness and periodic bathos, including elegies for June Carter Cash, Patsy Cline, the author’s father, an ex-cat, and others. At the heart of the collection is a rhyming sonnet crown that offers a wicked inversion of the book’s larger vision by constructing an apocalyptic mythology of matrilineal inheritance reliant on resistance, destruction, and martyrdom as much as on cycles of creation and healing.

Chelsea Whitton is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in many print and online publications including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Copper Nickel, Cimarron Review, and Poetry Ireland, among others. She lives in southwestern Ohio and teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

“Chelsea Whitton’s Wonder Wheel is wide-ranging formally, tender in its depictions of family, startling in the evocation of violence, and calming in its grasp of the world’s wideness.” ~Mark Jarman

“Whether grappling with the tumultuous relationship between past and future selves, the grotesqueries of how femininity is constructed and performed, or the complexities of loss, Wonder Wheel is self-observant, candid, quirky, and poignant, full of unexpected gestures around whose corners lie profound discoveries.” ~Rebecca Lindenberg

“Whitton’s voice is virtuosic, knocking off poetic forms with a seemingly effortless bravado, while also slipping into the confessional intimacy of a late night on Brooklyn bar stools sharing clove cigarettes. This is a stunning debut that is profoundly joyful and deeply serious.” ~Jason Schneiderman

“Full of spit and sass, contradiction and denial, the center of Whitton’s wickedly off-kilter poetry churns with desire, her mind’s maw swirling large as a sunflower’s corolla.” ~Cate Marvin

Book Cover Image

Book Announcement

Chelsea Whitton Author Photo (Photo Credit: Ananda Lima)