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

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