“…With ‘more shapes than water’ and ’more selves than the Trinity,’ these poems explore the music of love and the weight of grief, while always being mindful of ’history in the making– brutal, bloody, bootless.’  Here is a lifetime of poetry, a treasure house of what art can aspire to.  With consummate skill, Wheatcroft probes the world for what won’t be sentimentalized, falsified, and is willing to embrace nothing, if that’s the final truth–but ‘nothing’ has never been so alive, moving, passionate, and compelling.” -Betsy Sholl 

The Fugitive Self: New and Selected Poems by John Wheatcroft is a tribute to a distinguished career spanning fifty years in American letters. At once meditative, whimsical, and hard-hitting, it 0illuminates the spiritual cost of American expansion.

John Wheatcroft is the author of twenty books in three genres, a WWII combat veteran, and Professor Emeritus at Bucknell University.  He has been a resident fellow at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Publication date: October 2009

Read an excerpt of The Fugitive Self.