Voluntary Servitude

The poems in Mark Wunderlich’s Voluntary Servitude ask of the beloved, “You say, Don’t wreck me, and I say I won’t, but how can I know that?” Here the poet is both servant and master to memory, sex, family, and the will of the lover, and the resulting poems describe the physical and psychological constraints and releases of relationships at the breaking point.

“How the psyche heals itself: first, exposure to genuine harm. A pill pulls a white curtain around the metal bed of your brain. Memory bores through fluid, tissue, bone. Your days, in the meantime, which whistle and loll and burn through the stories; which include meals, weather, and travel, which they say broadens. Eventually, the forest ‘a path which leads out to the open.’ A long-sought clearing, and Mark Wunderlich’s fine record of the achievement.” —C.D. Wright

“This haunting book proposes to consider ardor, love and betrayal through the lens of a particular rhetoric: the vocabulary of submission and domination, the dynamic of power and desire yoking slave and master, beast and trainer, the harnessed and the wielder of the whip.” —Mark Doty