The Wind-Up Gods

Imagine Scheherazade weaving a thousand nights, Orpheus transplanted to the southwest plucking his lyre while riding a twister, the “sullen art” side of Dylan Thomas, and a scientific historian who tackles the mysteries of laundry and human weather with the same keen eye as she takes on the universe-all rolled into a 4-alarm wordsmith as innovative as Edison, and so graceful, funny and serious in the same sentence that her first collection-‘a basic-building-block-of-the-universe gig’-reads like Beethoven’s Ninth. Reader, The Wind-Up Gods is poetry for those who want their language worked, like Rodin worked clay, and molded into something heartfelt, moving, and whip-smart.

-Roger Weingarten

Welcome to the world of The Wind-Up Gods, where Newtonian Girl struggles to maintain a few clockwork certainties in the face of quantum anarchy, and Stefi Weisburd finds post-Heisenberg salvation through irony, imagination, and the vivid language of these wild, brainy, and visceral poems.

-Charles Harper Webb

What a striking pantheon the deities of Stefi Weisburd’s The Wind-Up Gods make. It is that rare book unafraid of ambition and ideas, of scope, while never sacrificing emotion, never receding into dead rhetoric. ‘God what cold star are you’ asks one poem and smartly never answers as Newtonian Girls and little gods float about in strange physics and kleptopoets steal words like candy. This book, this poet, will steal you too.

-Paul Guest