Rodeo (Autumn House Press)

Winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize

“Why can’t Jesus / come already? We’re a mess.” Indeed, Rodeo is that brand of backslap—furious and cunning and deftly crafted, by no means reluctant to say the whispered stuff out loud. This book rises above a tough and formidable field simply by not needing to rise at all—the poet’s wry and revelatory stanzas ride high through minefields of love and heart-numbing loss before accompanying the reader on, in the poet’s own words, “a slow descent into the heart of the world.”
—Patricia Smith, Prize Judge and author of Unshuttered

Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s latest collection is fueled by that most harrowing of losses, the death of a child. Remarkably, the resulting pieces are not so much jeremiad as elegy, not so much documentary as hard-scrabble celebration. These pages are peopled by neighbors and misfits, strangers and family and creatured by skunks and badgers and coyotes eating hot dogs behind Conoco. What do these agents have in common? They’ve figured out how to survive. Over and over, this collection smudges the line between the remarkable and the quotidian. Poets have been singing the West for at least a couple centuries but not the way Wilkinson does it. Here we have écriture feminine, with plenty of room to re-write the female body via chaps and spurs, Buddha and Wonder Woman, tents and blackberry jam, meteor showers and family trees.
—Lance Larson, author of Making a Kingdom of It

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

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