Poems considering self, masculinity, and culture through the spectacle of professional wrestling.\nIn this stunning debut, John Belk looks at the world of professional wrestling to excavate the real within the artificial and explore the projections we create, run from, and delight in. In The Gardens of Our Childhoods, the distance between spectacle and reality blurs.\nBelk uses the spectacle of wrestling to stare deeply into American culture and masculinity, parsing the intersecting threads of patriarchy and gender, and unpacking identity formation and performance. As Belk pries into toxic masculinities, he leaves space also for tenderness, queerness, and resistance to normative structures, opening the potential for love and admiration. Populated by classic and contemporary wrestlers like André the Giant, Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bruno Sammartino, Marcus “Buff” Bagwell, and more, this book is ultimately about the constant deconstruction and reconstruction of our identities that smudge fiction and reality. Like wrestlers in their operatic and winding storylines, we learn how to project and inhabit identities while growing into and fighting against the scripts we write for ourselves and those that are imposed on us.\nThe Gardens of Our Childhoods is the winner of Autumn House Press’s Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.

The Gardens of Our Childhoods (Autumn House Rising Writer Prize)

Literature & Fiction

Belk, John

Poetry

Autumn House Press

Poetry Chapbook by John Belk, produced by Cathexis Northwest Press. John Belk is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Utah University where he directs the Writing Program. His poetry has appeared in Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cathexis Northwest, Salt Hill, Kestrel, Worcester Review, Poetry South, San Pedro River Review, and Arkansas Review among others. His scholarship can be found in Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Forum, and edited anthologies. He currently lives in southern Utah among red rocks and stands of juniper. &#65279;&#65279;"Igneous rock-fire and stone. The juxtaposition of movement and stasis shape this lovely collection by John Belk. The fact that we are 'hurtling through vastness in inconceivable rush' is countered by 'found' rituals that slow down an unwieldy sense of mortality. These poems ask 'How fragile are our carefully/curated selves?' This chapbook deftly creates a strata of 'selves' formed by grief, hope, death, love, and tenuous survival instincts. Individually, each poem uncovers layers such that reveal the 'memory' a rock carries of its origins from within the earth, the stories behind scars on a woman's arm, or a holiness in 'colonies of lichen.' As a collection, Belk's poetry offers a quiet yet stunning affirmation of how language 'made of the oldest words' will outlast our own 'weathering.'" Danielle Dubrasky, author of Ruin and Light

The Weathering of Igneous Rockforms in High-Altitude Riparian Environments

Cathexis Northwest Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Belk, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Belk, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Belk, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Gardens of Our Childhoods (Autumn House Rising Writer Prize)

The Weathering of Igneous Rockforms in High-Altitude Riparian Environments