Winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize for poetic innovation

Spilt captures the experience of living between the domestic and the absurd, the lyrical and the narrative, oscillating between these states as a reflection of day-to-day existence. The poems explore both pandemic and non-pandemic experiences of separation and quarantine, blending whimsy, deadpan humor, stark realism, and pure fantasy. Each poem stands isolated as its own distinct world (or word), slightly out of sync with our reality of excess and overwhelming information. The poems in Spilt leak and escape, striving to connect with one another and with us, gathering socially, often stretching lines and language to their limits before pulling them back again.

Jordan Stempleman’s Spilt is intellectual, elliptical, ragged, and endlessly surprising. A master of sonic textures and odd juxtapositions, his poems are attuned to breaking through to new vistas at the level of language... Exhibiting philosophical rigor and a deft command of voice, the poems hide a simmering pain under the surface, and they spill—in the sense of both revealing and overflowing. —Sean Singer

The poems in Jordan Stempleman’s Spilt are often activated by distortion, as if there is a vibration inside language that keeps awakening its inherent poetry. Amplified by metagrammatic energy, whereby things go “bloom” rather than “boom” and one is “straying young,” these are poems written against fatigue, wary of the reckless “potential for an accident / to replace the imagination, to replace that glow / that floors us open / and pours on in.” —Kristi Maxwell

These are poems written from the hardcore, multitasking bardo of the middle-aged mind as it spirals on hold with the dentist, mowing the lawn (so much yard work), ignoring emails, and binge-watching meaning-making in the baffling aboveground pool of 21st century American culture... While these poems might ultimately be about the slippery business of getting your stupid soul straight, they are also as gorgeous as a remembered sky and funny; I really, actually, laughed out loud. Spilt is a wonderful book. —Sommer Browning

Stempleman’s tenth collection marks two decades of the poet’s idiosyncratic imagery, surprising syntax, and provocative revelry in the face of contemporary conundrums. Many poems bring multiple, seemingly unrelated, elements into collision, only to extricate profound truth from the jumble, as in “How to Begin,” in which the speaker wrestles with writer’s block, ponders the impending death of a snowblower, and ultimately lands on the strangely prescient insight that “expertise / has a diction the present rarely tolerates.” In fresh, unexpected ways, Stempleman frees syntax from sense to arrive at unbridled wonderment, “Leave / the could have could / until the undo / does the evers into ah.” Startling, vivacious imagery abounds; jellyfish are “gasses that blister into glowwater and empty / headaches,” and a baby who looks like Pat Sajack pendulates inside a toddler swing that resembles a rubber diaper. Another defining feature is Stempleman’s humor, whether delivered in amusing quips “Overboard! / is a lousy pickup line”) or startling observations, “Have you ever seen so many bowl cuts / in one place?” An excellent title from this endlessly inventive poet. —Diego Báez, Booklist

• Read “The Amateurs” and “A Successful Marriage” from Spilt

• Rob McLennan interviews Jordan Stempleman