Strung Out Along the Endless Branch by Wesley Houp was selected by Greg Pape as the winner of the inaugural James Baker Hall Book Award. Accents Publishing is proud to present this debut collection by a brilliant poet, philosopher and observer of both human nature and the natural world. What Others Say About Strung Out Along the Endless Branch
What a joy to read G. Wesley Houp's book, Strung Out Along the Endless Branch. My favorites among the poems read like the fables found in folk music; their narratives and imagery both delight and trouble the reader. Other poems draw from history and biology, then sometimes veer into the surreal. Several poems are populated by Houp's children and those of his neighbors, who act as the magic, promise and thermometer of their society. "Infinity Girl," for example, observes his daughter on a swing: "a circuit of momentum//as harmless as a small body of light/that illuminates the playground." This is followed by "The Future," that begins "There goes the/NARCAN truck." The tension between the rural and the urban is introduced in the very first poem: "The school bus winds down/Laura Thompson Trail/plucking up the forest children/and trundling them off/to school in town." Houp's close attention to the native flora and fauna around him recalls the poems of James Baker Hall, the wonderful Kentucky poet and artist. In fact, Strung Out Along the Endless Branch is the first recipient of the new book award in Hall's name.
—Marcia Hurlow, author of Practice Rapture
Wesley Houp has a way of sketching a scene or telling a tale so that the imagined backstory, what isn't said but lurks just outside the poem's words, carries the emotion and meaning and keeps resonating. Emily Dickinson said, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant—". The poems in Strung Out Along the Endless Branch seem to follow that advice. It is a book of poems with its own charmed, often fabulous (in the sense of fable-like) way of evoking and presenting contemporary realities and absurdities, garbled politics, drugs, dangers and divisions of all sorts, but also, the rich particulars, characters, and daily wonders of this world. It is a pointed, yet tender, pasquinade or satire, moving, thought provoking, insightful, funny, heartbreaking.
—Greg Pape, author of A Field of First Things, Four Swans, Animal Time, and others
W. Houp is a Revelator. He seems to know instinctually that poems are not an "expressing," or even primarily a "creating," but foremost an in-seeing, a result of attending so intently to the objects and experiences of the world, in all their urgent, opaque materiality, that they finally open to reveal the luminous and illuminating hidden in them. Every poem in this robust collection achieves this, their sparse, refreshing clarity bespeaking an eye and mind and art that will settle for nothing less, or more, than the vital and vitally essential, which reveals itself, and which the poet so profoundly captures in poem after poem, with the frequently excruciating quietude and grace of the sacred—all the more sacred for the very mundanity of the objects and moments so lovingly, humbly, and artfully retrieved, preserved, and gifted to the reader, who can only appropriately respond with wonder and gratitude for the revelation.
—T. Crunk, author of Hopkinsville
Wesley Houp has shown us, in this collection of poetry, a way to discover poems—hidden everywhere, if we are alert enough to notice them.
—Mary Ann Taylor-Hall, author of Out of Nowhere: New and Selected Poems.
Another Gladelarking
Whippoorwill glade margins
jeweled with late summer gumweed.
Rose pink hanging on.
A gold finch burns in atmosphere.
At the far end a single
branch of persimmon waves.
My father waved like that
across the tobacco field
so many years ago.
No great effort,
just an arm raised momentarily
to say let's go home.
Something similar
is about to happen
in the next universe,
and I want to be there.
Details and Ordering
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Format: Softcover, 6" x 9"
ISBN: 978-1-961127-14-2
Price: $19.00 Not yet available to order. Please check back soon.
About the Author
Wesley Houp was born and raised in High Bridge and Wilmore, Kentucky. He received a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and taught undergraduate and graduate English courses for over 20 years in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Tennessee in addition to serving as Writing Center Director at several universities. For the better part of the last decade, he has worked for Tennessee State Parks. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Black Warrior Review, Chattahoochee Review, Kentucky Poetry Review, and Good River Review. His scholarly work in literacy education and pedagogy has appeared in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy and Teaching English in the Two-Year College, among others. This volume, his first, won the inaugural James Baker Hall Book Award for Poetry in 2024. He currently lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee with his wife, Laura and their daughter and son, Chloe and Henry.
Strung Out Along the Endless Branch by Wesley Houp was selected by Greg Pape as the winner of the inaugural James Baker Hall Book Award. Accents Publishing is proud to present this debut collection by a brilliant poet, philosopher and observer of both human nature and the natural world.