Which Way Was North - by Anne Pierson Wiese (Paperback)

About the Book

"Drawing on materials from local, historical, and personal sources, she creates a new territory of the mind that invites the reader to see similarity as well as difference between these distinct regions of the United States. Stressing the ways in which mundane physical locations or daily routines can possess human significance beyond the immediate, Which Way Was North approaches elements such as wild grape vines and country cemeteries, along with subway preachers and weeds in sidewalk cracks, as vital starting points for reflection. Fundamentally, Wiese's poems show that our individual powers of observation remain our most life-affirming means of response to the existential questions posed by our surroundings, regardless of which place we happen to call home. One of the most important questions in our lives, as the title of the collection implies, continues to be: how do we maintain our spiritual and imaginative equilibrium in a twenty-first-century world of artificial intelligence that increasingly instructs us to forgo the personal compass?"--

Book Synopsis

In Which Way Was North, Anne Pierson Wiese juxtaposes poems from her years living in New York City with work written after her relocation to South Dakota. By exploring local, historical, and personal sources, she invites readers to see an unmapped territory of the mind informed by these distinct regions of the United States.

Suggesting that mundane physical places and daily routines can possess significance beyond the immediate, Which Way Was North offers elements such as wild grapevines and country cemeteries, along with subway preachers and weeds emerging from sidewalk cracks, as vital starting points for reflection. Fundamentally, Wiese's poems show that our individual powers of observation remain the most life-affirming response to the existential questions posed by our surroundings, regardless of where we happen to call home.

Review Quotes

"Anne Pierson Wiese's hauntingly direct poems take us into the bone vault of America, where we can hear a heartbeat. She is a graceful, quietly exact, masterful poet."--Henri Cole

"Wiese's new book is a marvel of energy and observation."--Willard Spiegelman

"Wiese's poetry teaches us that the distance is not between Sioux Falls and Brooklyn, between nature and machinery, between lifeblood and graveyard, it is 'between tasting and living.'"--Shawkat Toorawa

About the Author

Anne Pierson Wiese was born in Minnesota, raised in New York City, where she lived for many years, and currently resides in South Dakota with her husband, writer Ben Miller. Her first poetry collection, Floating City, received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Additional honors for her work include the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize.