Cheryl Wilder

Cheryl Wilder’s collection Anything That Happens, a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection (Press 53), received Second Finalist in the Poetry Society of Virginia North American Book Award and Honorable Mention in the Brockman-Campbell Book Award. She is the author of the chapbook, What Binds Us (Finishing Line Press); her work appears in Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath (Press 53), Barely South Review, and Architects + Artisans, among other publications. She served as writer-in-residence at SistaWRITE, held residency at SAFTA, and received a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Support Grant for her forthcoming poetry collection. Co-founder of Waterwheel Review and president of the Burlington Writers Club, Cheryl earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her home is near the Haw River in North Carolina.

Sample Poem

Xing

I don’t know how I brought a child
into the world when I can’t reconcile

if crashing a car and a friend’s skull
is karmic debt created

or payment for a past immoral act.
I open doors and say thank you and do not try

to behave in a way I cannot afford.
There’s no barometer, no way to know

if the pendulum is swinging
away or toward, how many pay-it-forwards it takes

before I break even at the gambling table.
I could blend in with the pure

if it weren’t for the scars that don’t fade
no matter how many turtles I save,

so am I all that surprised
when my little boy tells me

of his palpable fear
to cross the street.

Praise for Anything That Happens

The difficult story of what follows a terrible accident in Anything That Happens has me thinking about the word aftermath, how it means not only dire consequences but second-growth, as new grass after a harvest. Cheryl Wilder's poems are almost shatteringly direct: they explore guilt and suffering so cleanly and so precisely that every detail testifies, and mercy is ever possible. This is a brave and honorable book.

—Nancy Eimers, author of Oz

Anything That Happens is a mature poetic inquiry into the ways early trauma can reverberate through the whole of a life—relationships, family, one’s sense of self. The poems are candid, sharp-edged and very well rendered. You can taste “the bone in the broth” here as Wilder works through the maze of emotion. In the end, we witness change and redemption, but the psychic weight remains. As she aptly describes it: “I am two people now— / the before and the after; one I’ve already forgotten, / the other I have not met.”

—Mark Cox, author of Readiness: Prose Poems