The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press)

Finalist for The Hudson Prize

“There are marvelous poems here, poems that range through the world…. These are poems “you can ride … into tomorrow.” Sunni Wilkinson is a welcome new poet for our times.” - Joseph Stroud

The poems in Sunni Wilkinson’s The Marriage of the Moon and the Field show us history, affection, private struggle, and the common life with a kind of grave, irony-tinged happiness that is rare in the poetry of our time. Her poems turn away from complaint, as though she had set out to reveal instead the domestic life of intelligence in all its color, warmth, and depth. This is a very fine debut volume, worth treasuring; and more are sure to follow. – Christopher Howell

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poems sustain a compelling tension between the macro and the micro worlds. Scientific facts of the physical realm collide with intimate interiorities. She turns a steely eye and a tender heart toward the experience of living fully in the rush of the NOW and the flickering echoes of what came before. These are lushly rendered poems to savor and/or devour. - Nance Van Winckel

The Ache and the Wing (Sundress Publications) Winner of the 2020 Sundress Chapbook Contest

“In a ‘world wired for worry,’ enter these elegant poems. A catalogue of the real, The Ache & The Wing is filled with the miraculous everyday—the arms of the saguaro raised like ‘monks blessing the cracked earth;’ filled as well with ‘what eats your heart / into grave simplicity.’ The kaleidoscopic forms of loss include the burning of Yosemite and the weeping body of a stillborn child. Maybe, ‘the world is a starving coyote,’ maybe this poet has ‘so much sad truth to say,’ but the haunting images also hold hope. Perhaps the poems can teach ‘the difficult, / liquid art of living,’ teach their own delicate balancing of the ‘broken and beautiful.’ Here, Wilkinson marvels at birds who ‘make music out of nothing;’ she commands us: ‘open your emerald throat again.'” -Kimberly Blaeser, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16

“Prepare yourself for grief-work. For deep empathy-work. Then enter the hospital room of a mother who’s just given birth, hold the small cold body for three hours with her, see his blue eyes, dab his weeping ’tissue-paper skin.’ The brutal honesty, rawness, and lyric beauty of these poems will guide you down the mineshaft of sorrow, flesh you in a mother’s after-birth body dropping ‘milk / tears / one / by one / down / your / loose / and ragged / torso.’ Wilkinson’s astonishingly vulnerable and masterfully crafted poems, ‘Something between a prayer / and a baring of teeth,’ will leave you trembling, full of ache, yearning for wings, attending to that ‘darkest hallelujah.'” -Dayna Patterson

“Lyrical and elegiac, this collection boldly explores a range of personal tragedies and uncertainties—the unexpected death of a son, the memory of a mother leaving, the realization that life had different plans than were originally conceived. As the speaker so succinctly states, ‘I don’t want another love story. / I want immortality,’ but if immortality is off the table, then let us sit with a collection that page after page does everything it can to provide an authentic space to heal.” -Esteban Rodriguez