In this, her third collection of poems, Eleanor Wilner revises a number of our culture's central myths; invoking figures as diverse as Briar Rose and Miriam the Prophet, she casts upon their stories, and choices, an enlivening feminist perspective."There is so much that is impressive in Wilner's mature poems. In an era which has been labelled 'The End of History,' she examines history's less obvious lessons. If the past is to teach us, she seems to say, then we must re-invent and re-shape it."—Poetry

Sarah's Choice (Phoenix Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Wilner, Eleanor

Poetry

University of Chicago Press

In this, her third collection of poems, Eleanor Wilner revises a number of our culture's central myths; invoking figures as diverse as Briar Rose and Miriam the Prophet, she casts upon their stories, and choices, an enlivening feminist perspective. "There is so much that is impressive in Wilner's mature poems. In an era which has been labelled 'The End of History,' she examines history's less obvious lessons. If the past is to teach us, she seems to say, then we must re-invent and re-shape it."—Poetry

Otherwise (Phoenix Poets)

Eleanor Wilner loosens the attachments of traditional figures to the old historical ground and sets them free—to suggest how it might have been otherwise, and might still be. This is the most important book yet from the acclaimed poet and MacArthur prize winner."Otherwise is ambitious and patient, built on the spider's stratagem: the poet throws out a long tentative thread, then spins carefully outward until we see the new shape standing on air."—Carol Muske, The New York Times Book Review"In a book of poems, one is happy to find half a dozen remarkable performances—poems worth rereading and even committing to memory. In Otherwise—which is splendid from the title on—it would be hard to find half a dozen which failed to equal Wilner's stratospheric standard."—David Slavit, Seven Arts

Eleanor Wilner’s poems attempt to absorb the shock of the wars and atrocities of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their litany of loss, in their outrage and sorrow, they retain the joy in life, mercy for the mortal condition, and praise for the plenitude of nature and the gifts of human artistry.
As with her six earlier collections, these poems are drawn from the transpersonal realm of history and cultural memory, but they display an increasing horror at the bloody repetitions of history, its service of death, and the destructive savagery of power separated from intelligence and restraint. The poems describe “a sordid drama” in which the players wear “eyeless masks,” and the only thing time changes is the name of the enemy. Underneath it all, driving “the art that” in both senses “keeps nothing at bay,” swim the enormous formal energies of life, the transitive figure that moves on in the depths, something glimpsed in the first light, something stronger than hope. 
“It is a relief to come across work in which a moral intelligence is matched by aesthetic refinement, in which the craft of the poems is equal to their concerns.”--Christian Wiman, Poetry

Tourist in Hell (Phoenix Poets)

Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change. In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air--a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life. Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as "Sarah's Choice" and "Reading the Bible Backwards." In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry's lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.

United States

Princeton University Press

A major new collection from the winner of the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry
Before Our Eyes gathers more than thirty new poems by Eleanor Wilner, along with representative selections from her seven previous books, to present a major overview of her distinguished body of work. A poet who engages with history in lyrical language, Wilner creates worlds that reflect on and illuminate the actual one, drawing on the power of communal myth and memory to transform them into agents of change.
In these poems, well-known figures step out of old texts to alter their stories and new figures arise out of the local air―a girl with a fury of bees in her hair, homesick statues that step down from their pedestals, a bat cave whose altar bears a judgment on our worship of war, and a frog whose spring wakening invites our own. In the process, ancient myths are naturalized while nature is newly mythologized in the service of life.
Before Our Eyes features widely anthologized works such as “Sarah’s Choice” and “Reading the Bible Backwards.” In the new poems, Wilner records the bewildering public shocks of the current moment, when civic life is under threat, when language itself is attacked, and when poetry’s lens of collective imagination becomes a way to resist falsity, to seek meaning, and to really see what is before our eyes.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.
This volume includes translations by Eleanor Wilner with Inés Azar (Medea), Marilyn Nelson (Hecuba), Donald Junkins (Andromache), and Daniel Mark Epstein (The Bacchae).

Euripides, 1 : Medea, Hecuba, Andromache, the Bacchae (Penn Greek Drama Series)

Nelson, Marilyn

EPSTEIN, Daniel Mark

Junkins, Donald

Eurípides

Dramas & Plays

University of Pennsylvania Press

"If there is one person who epitomizes the best of today's women's poetry, it is surely Eleanor Wilner."--Booklist

Reversing the Spell: New & Selected Poems

Copper Canyon Press

GONE TO EARTH brings to light, late in the long, distinguished career of poet Eleanor Wilner, her early uncollected poems—an unveiling of the first stages of a vital, imaginative process, in whose evocative, imagistic landscapes is enacted a drama of emergence from entrapment. In the often-painful drama of new birth, from the deadly strictures and oppressions of the older social forms, come the living forces undermining them—new life seeded out of a decaying order: “a wet nose / breaks the earth, and sniffs the river air.” Written during the poet’s immersion in the civil rights movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, an inner liberating struggle is tuned to a collective channel where communal memory and vision are undergoing transformation.

Gone to Earth: Early and Uncollected Poems 1963-1976

Crooked Hearts Press

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

Books by Wilner, Eleanor

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

Sarah's Choice (Phoenix Poets)

Sarah's Choice (Phoenix Poets)

Otherwise (Phoenix Poets)

Otherwise (Phoenix Poets)

Tourist in Hell (Phoenix Poets)

Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets)

Euripides, 1 : Medea, Hecuba, Andromache, the Bacchae (Penn Greek Drama Series)

Reversing the Spell: New & Selected Poems

Gone to Earth: Early and Uncollected Poems 1963-1976