"Make some music in the wreckage," fictional poet Paul Chowder advises in Nicholson Baker's Traveling Sprinkler (2013), and real-world poet Charles Cantrell takes up that
challenge in poems that thrum with romanticism amid bruise and ruin, amid the clamorous machinery of America. Wild Wreckage offers homage to labor and language, and to the
"great / distance between love and silence" that these poems make palpable with clarity and affection.
-Michael Waters