Publications
Author Biography
John Wilkinson was born in London in 1953. He grew up in Cornwall & Devon before reading English at Cambridge. He passed a year at Harvard working on the poetry of John Wieners, thereafter training as a psychiatric nurse. John has worked as Head of Mental Health and Assistant Director of Public Health at East London & The City Health Authority. During 2003-4 John was attached to the Center for the Study of Issues in Public Mental Health, New York, as a Fulbright Scholar. He is now an associate professor at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. John is married to the literary critic Maud Ellman. His writing is collected in Contrivances (Salt, 2003), Effigies Against the Light (Salt, 2001), Oorts Cloud (Barque, 1999), Flung Clear (Parataxis 1994), Proud Flesh (Délires and Equofinality 1986) and Clinical Notes (Délires 1980).
An interview with Wilkinson by Andrew Duncan is published in Angel Exhaust.
More about John Wilkinson»Excerpt
They rigidify the airy squint, raise ocean
with their frothy blood, even the rocks swell
horrified, why the dead are not ghostly!
but contract to make more of flimsy projects.
We ply between economies: fixed rates
feed upon us and we feed upon mucky fields,
our recompense the overabundance that presses.
Get on board now, get in ,help up your father
on the gang-walk,
plenty of bucks and welters below.
Twist one string so mother suffocates,
bandaged in enormous vestments.
Or was it a mother rolled
her corded sky-hanging of her own volition,
tropical print
