Boxed Juice

Boxed Juice is a rare and original work that makes clear why Danielle Chapman is so vital to contemporary poetry. Spontaneous and indelible, enchanting and disillusioned, extravagant and direct, these poems reveal what Chapman sees from within roles that our culture often renders invisible or ridiculous — mother, caregiver, Christian mystic, literary wife. From the taut, linguistically nimble stanzas of "Unspeakable" and "Kumquat" to the devastating and funny lyric essay at the book's center, Chapman invokes constraints even as she exuberantly shatters them. Yet, as acclaimed poet and critic Peter Campion notes in his foreword, "for all its elegance, this remains a work pitched against despair, an act of survival." Chapman and her husband, Christian Wiman, had been married for only 10 months when, in 2005, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable form of lymphoma, an event that ignited the couple's mutual thirst for God, and their quest for poems that could capture it. Chapman's work witnesses that harrowing story even as it maps a vision forward, stubbornly relishing the mischief and the joy, the ecstasy and absurdity — and, above all, the sound — of life, even when threatened by catastrophe. Following Delinquent Palaces (TriQuarterly, 2015), Boxed Juice distills Chapman's craft into a miracle of resilience. Danielle Chapman's poems are those of a spirit in whom the experience of being crushed is saved by the music that it yields.