Congratulations to Joseph Kershbaum, a member success story!
Come see Joseph at the IWC Member Meeting’s Featured Reading, Tuesday November 12
Joseph Kerschbaum’s most recent publications include Midnight Sunrise (Main Street Rag Press, 2024), Mirror Box (Main Street Rag Press, 2020), and Distant Shores of a Split Second (Louisiana Literature Press, 2018). His work has also appeared in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Hamilton Stone Review, The Inflectionist Review, and Main Street Rag. Joseph lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his family.
Read more about Joseph on his website and follow him on Twitter
Regarding his experience with the Indiana Writers Center, Joseph says, “IWC has always served as a source of inspiration and community. The artistic community of Indiana has always nurtured my artistic development. Some of the poems in “Midnight Sunrise” were first drafted in our National Poetry Month poem-a-day Facebook group!”
Midnight Sunrise is a collection that breaches edges and grasps the Earth. With gentle yet unnerving attention, Kerschbaum invites the familiar and for granted to wild the heart once more. These poems pulse with awe—for loved ones, for one’s lineage, for life itself. With each breath taken, there is a hand reached. With each precise observation comes a gesture inward, toward mystery. The ghosts are living. The ghosts “haunt/ our suspended selves.”
~Elizabeth Metzger, author of Lying In
A discern curator of the deep image, Joseph Kershbaum renders the ordinary unordinary—if not the domestic made terrifying—in lines as well-manicured as the proudest suburban lawn. His narrator, however, is painfully aware that “manicured lawns / are the byproduct / of pushing back / against the world / that wants to grow wild” (“Weed Garden”). Dripping with sonorousness, masterfully sequenced, each poem advances to the inevitable sense that, as Frost put it, “the final poem is the book itself.”
~Lissa Kiernan, author of The Whispering Wall & Founding Director of The Poetry Barn
A beautiful creation of song and scar, of emotional complexity and simple witness, Midnight Sunrise mingles the natural and human worlds in a series of compelling, remarkably honest poems. From bountiful harvest to decay, the landscapes he presents us with are deeply intertwined with and impacted by our identities. Brimming with both linguistic precision and intimate grace, these vibrant poems remain grounded in a universal familiarity that opens us up to something much greater.
~John Sibley Williams, author of The Drowning House and Scale Model of a Country at Dawn
Midnight Sunrise is a duende-filled magic carpet ride through the seemingly inconsequential moments of life: dinner with friends, tucking a child into bed. But as Kerschbaum eloquently reveals, nothing is inconsequential. After all, “any ordinary Tuesday in a doctor’s office can sever/the narrative of a life in progress.” In language both vivid and precise, Kerschbaum masterfully captures not only the significance of these moments, but their exquisite and often bittersweet beauty. I’m grateful to him for this luminous reminder that every split second is a gift.
~Kim Noriega, author of Name Me
We are happy to share the good news of our members! Please reach out to us if you have a success we can highlight.