Mark Wunderlich

Biography

Mark Wunderlich is the author of four collections of poems, most recently God of Nothingness (Graywolf, 2021). His other collections include The Earth Avails (Graywolf, 2014), which received the Rilke Prize; Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf, 2004); and The Anchorage (Massachusetts, 1999), which received the Lambda Literary Award. He is the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program. 

See Work

POETRY / Summer 2019

Death of a Cat

By Mark Wunderlich


Little beast on the metal table, she took
the needle into her forepaw 

and didn’t flinch. The medicinal death
fit itself inside her, ran the blue and red map,

burned up into her lungs and brain
and heart, which slowed,

and she slept until...

POETRY / Summer 2019

Haunted House

By Mark Wunderlich

I moved into the haunted house
and gutted it to the bones. I wasn’t alone then,

and worked there as a team. 
We evicted squirrels from their vast nutshell nest,

filled dumpsters with fifty years of trash.

POETRY / Summer 2019

Visitation

By Mark Wunderlich

My mother is alive and funny
in the house above the marsh.

I think she does not miss my father much
as he is still alive, though elsewhere.