Category Archives: Work by Caroline Wilkinson

New Poems at DIAGRAM

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I have two new poems up at DIAGRAM.

In the contributor’s note, I name a couple of influences for one of the poems. The first influence is “Paean to Place” by Lorine Niedecker, which can be found here at Poetry Foundation. The other is “Paradise” by Arthur Smith, which is available here through JSTOR.

The poem that these two works helped shape is about being a coat-check girl in a Manhattan social club.

Critical Article on George Eliot

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For the past three years, I have been studying creative writing and nineteenth-century British literature at the University of Tennessee where I am a Ph.D. candidate. In my first semester, I began writing about kabbalistic astronomy and astrology in George Eliot’s final novel, Daniel Deronda. I later expanded my study of Eliot’s mystical astral symbolism to include not only her last novel but her earlier epic poem, The Spanish Gypsy. In both works, Eliot offers Jewish mystics as characters: in Spanish Gypsy, she creates a Jewish astrologer who gives the hero advice; in Daniel Deronda, she has a kabbalistic visionary who emerges as an important figure in the novel’s middle and later chapters.

My completed article has just come out in George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies. In the essay, I explore how, in Daniel Deronda, Eliot moved the character of the mystic from the periphery to the center of the narrative. This change, symbolically equated within the novel to a shift from geocentricism to heliocentricism, affects time in Daniel Deronda both in terms of plot and historical focus. Not only does time slow as the mystic, Mordecai, assumes a central role, the astral imagery begins to draw upon a medieval past when Jewish thinkers explored interdisciplinary concepts of the heavens inspired by both poetry and the science of their time. I argue for the centrality of the astronomical imagery in relation to the Jewish themes of Daniel Deronda and show through my analysis of The Spanish Gypsy how Eliot employed kabbalistic ideas of the skies in an attempt to create a new vision of star-crossed love for literature.

To view the article, click here.

To read my earlier review of Anna Henchman’s book, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature, which also appeared in George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, go here.

Lettie from the Ocean

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Update: To view the piece below, please go to the site, Lettie from the Ocean.

Now up at Drunken Boat is my interactive media piece, “Lettie from the Ocean,” which features images from Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Curiosities. The piece, which author and editor Darren DeFrain kindly mentions in his introduction, is a work of fan fiction for Neil Gaimen’s novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Lettie Hempstock at the Bottom of the Ocean

Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes

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My review of Hilda Hilst’s With My Dog-Eyes is in the new print issue of Rain Taxi. The review begins:

The narrator of With My Dog-Eyes – a mathematician, Amós Kéres – turns the pronoun “I” into a variable. He then turns into an alpha – or to describe the transformation in all its beauty and horror, he enters the equation: “Amós = α.” Brazilian Hilda Hilst shows Amós fighting the sort of delusional magic that leads him to make equations out of his identity. He sees the magic of his own mind, which blends math and poetry, as a part of his nature. As he states in the poem that opens Hilst’s genre-defying work:

I was born a mathematician, a magician
I was born a poet.

To buy the issue, go here.

Review at DIAGRAM of Moritz and Patterson’s Elementary Rituals/Dirge

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Now up at DIAGRAM is my review of Rachel Moritz and Juliet Patterson’s Elementary Rituals/Dirge, two chapbooks brought together with an unusual binding. Stitched dos-à-dos, these works share a back board while their front covers fall on opposite sides of the book. I wrote about Moritz here on this website and Patterson here. Their work, then and now, is formally innovative and lyric in its intensity:

The dos-à-dos bindings has its origins in the prayer book, and Elementary Rituals/Dirge has the reverent quiet and scope of a devotional. Here is a prayer book for despair in which one death speaks to another over a natural bridge: a moment in which two deaths occur, a connection of chance and mortality.

For the full review, go here.

Story in “Debt Folio” of Drunken Boat

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A story of mine appears in a section of the new issue of Drunken Boat. The section, “Debt Folio,” was edited by poet Michelle Chan Brown, and the story, “They Won’t Take Your Ideas,” has a plot that owes much to indebtedness. Here’s the premise:

But we mustn’t indulge in summer ourselves. This winter we got into debt. A medical bill paid through a credit service has become so expensive that we get sick thinking of it—so we try not to. We just keep in mind that we must pay it before winter. If we don’t, we’ll have to move to someplace less expensive.

For the full story with audio recording, go here.

Kate Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold at Rain Taxi

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Now up at Rain Taxi is my review of Kate Bernheimer’s newest book:

Kate Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold—the last novel in her trilogy about three sisters—makes for an unusually happy ending. Lucy, the most cheerful of the Golds, steps forward to recount her life and untimely death. Her novel, like the others in the trilogy, draws upon traditions of the fairy tale. “Dearest robins, my precious friends!” Lucy exclaims while recalling a time she lived in the woods. “Did you ever love something so much you just wanted to eat it?” Her joy is so strong that it shatters and erases. In the breaks and blanks it leaves behind comes a sense of Lucy’s isolation.

For the full review, go here.