My poetry book, Transistor Rodeo, won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, and was published by University of Utah Press in April 2010. You can buy it directly from the press, from your local bookstore (if you ask nicely), or through the ususal online sources (Powell's, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, Horse Gear USA, and others). If you're local to Santa Fe, you can get it at Collected Works.
Reviews
Some nice things people have said about the book:
Ander Monson, poet and essayist:
First off you need to know how much fun Jon Wilkins's Transistor Rodeo is: a whole lot, a thousand afternoons of brainy, brawling, fragrant, dazzling microscopic daisies. Very few books deliver as much electricity per line, per poem, as this one does, and fewer still can sustain that charge until, crackling, imagination flashes and gives way to beauty.
Whether prayer or sonnet, parable, love song, or theorem, or frequently more than one of these, a Wilkins poem ambles and darts, hesitates, notices its surrounding, changes direction, exults, and delivers us into an entirely new place. Are we changed by reading this? I think we are. Wilkins is an alchemist. Wilkins should be your alchemist.
D. A. Powell, poet
This guy out-Kochs Koch, which is terribly hard to do. Sophisticated, witty, passionate and formally savvy, this is one of the finest contemporary collections I've read and easily one of the best debuts of recent years.
-- Via Goodreads
Brilliant debut: Transistor Rodeo by Jon Wilkins. Audaciously titled poems "Please don't hate me because I'm perfect" earn their audacity !
-- Via Twitter
It was also reviewed in the Cafe Review (text here) and Apalachee Review (text here)
Samples
In case you weren't convinced to pick up a copy of Transistor Rodeo on the basis of the cover (which features an awesome picture by Emmy-winning artist Seonna Hong), here are a couple of sample poems from the book. These will change periodically, so check back again.
Love Song
In time we will know if it was true.
Lost among the many kindnesses
and lists of tasks to be accomplished
was a pepper shaker shaped
like a lesser-known saint, and the salt
shaker shaped like the sin
that hunted him all his life.
Lost among it all was how
the two fit together to form
a porcelain pig whose beauty
could set a Czar’s daughter spinning
Love Song
It’s always the same old thing. A room
and a corner and a chair and a man.
A woman and the sections of a workaday heart
and each one a lost childhood
pet. Here it is a room and a table.
An edge of a table and coffee spilled
like a promise about to pour like Visigoths
into the valley of the end of the world
, or so I told my other lovers.
Your love was caustic, then comfortable,
and now it seems impossible to think.