Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

Heroin Haikus by William Wantling, reviewed

Denise Enck

William Wantling Heroin Haikus

Heroin Haikus by William Wantling / Tangerine Press / 2016 / 20 pages / 978-1-910691-18-2

William Wantling’s Heroin Haikus, out of print for fifty years, was recently published in a new edition by London’s Tangerine Press.

William Wantling
The book’s last page features a biographical sketch of the poet. From 1958 to 1963, Wantling was incarcerated at San Quentin, the consequence of a crime spree with his then-wife which supported their heroin addictions. But the time in prison had a silver lining, as it was there that he began writing. These Heroin Haikus follow his experiences in prison.

Wantling was released from prison a changed man. He was now a writer and went on to earn two degrees in English from Illinois State University, where he was a lecturer for several years before his death at age forty. During his brief literary career in the 1960s and early 1970s, many poems and several books were published by small presses.

Heroin Haikus was first published by Fenian Head Centre Press in 1966; Tangerine’s new edition is handsomely printed and retains the original’s anxiety-infused drawings by Ben Tibbs.

Ten haikus are presented, each comprised of three or four lines totalling seventeen syllables. They are at once elegant and potent. Here are two examples:

THE FIX

  Give me the moment
that will join me to myself
  in a mad embrace

LOS ANGELES—1

  Full moon.
I bolt my door—
  as up the ancient stairs
  cocaine shadows glide . . .

A few deftly rendered strokes capture the entire cycle of the poet’s addiction: from getting high to getting busted, a cockroach-filled jail cell, withdrawals, prison life and family pain.

Though Wantling’s books have been long out of print, Tangerine Press has been working to remedy that situation; Heroin Haikus follows the press’s publication of In the Enemy Camp (2015), which is described as the “definitive edition” of the poet’s work.

These ten Heroin Haikus, offer proof that Wantling is a poet whose work, brilliant in its ability to encapsulate deep emotion and experience in just a few lines, deserves a fresh look.

Share on TwitterShare on Facebook

Denise Enck

Denise is Empty Mirror's founder and editor. She's edited several other literary magazines and small-press publications since the 1990s. When not at Empty Mirror, you can probably find her reading or writing -- or out exploring the back roads and beaches of Washington State.

Author: Denise Enck Tags: book reviews, poetry reviews Category: Book Reviews April 27, 2017

You might also like:

Alice in tumblr-Land by Tim Manley
Book Review: Alice In tumblr-Land (And Other Fairy Tales For A New Generation)
Time Adjusters and Other Stories by Bill Ectric
Book Review – Time Adjusters & Other Stories by Bill Ectric
BULLY LOVE Patricia Colleen Murphy
Bully Love by Patricia Colleen Murphy, reviewed by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
Spectrum of Flight, poems by David Hanlon
David Hanlon’s Spectrum of Flight, reviewed by Kaleb Tutt

Comments

  1. Sam Silva says

    April 29, 2017 at 1:28 pm

    The book definitely sounds interesting.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!


Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2023 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures