Valerie Wohlfeld

Valerie Wohlfeld, (b. 1956 in Sacramento, California) is an American poet.

Life

She was educated at American University, and Sarah Lawrence College, and received an M.F.A. from Vermont College in 1983. Valerie Wohlfeld’s 1994 collection, Thinking the World Visible, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her book, Woman with Wing Removed, came out in 2010 from Truman State University Press. Her work has appeared in The Antioch Review, New England Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, and elsewhere.

Works

• The Uccello, The New Yorker, May 8, 1988
• Nautilus; Beeyard, The Antioch Review, Volume 58 Number 1, Winter 2000
• Dove; Rib; Fire and Flux, Prairie Schooner, Volume 77, Number 3, Fall 2003
• The Sugar Tooth, AGNI, Boston University, Volume 37, 1993
• Trinkets, AGNI, Boston University, Volume 34, 1991
• Vessel, The New Criterion, November 2002
• The Cut Hair of Nuns, The Antioch Review, Volume 61 Number 2, Spring 2003
• Apple, The Seneca Review, Vol. 33 Issue 2, Fall 2003
• Fruit for the Fall, The Antioch Review, Volume 63 Number 3, Summer 2005
• Poppies, Ploughshares, Spring 2007
• HEART: SPECIMEN, VALPARAISO POETRY REVIEW, Spring/Summer 2007
• Bejeweled; Lot’s Daughters, Prairie Schooner, Volume 82, Number 1, Spring 2008
• Wind, The Antioch Review, Volume 66 Number 1, Winter 2008
• Vertigo, JAMA, 2008;299(8):878

Books

• Thinking the World Visible, Yale University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-300-06018-1
• Woman with Wing Removed, Truman State University Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1-935503-06-4

Anthologies

• William J. Walsh, Jack (INT) Myers (2006). Under the rock umbrella. Mercer University Press. p. 407. ISBN 978-0-88146-047-6.
• Poets of the New Century Editors Roger Weingarten and Richard M. Higgerson, David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 2001, ISBN 1-56792-178-7
• The Yale Younger Poets Anthology Editor George Bradley, Yale University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-300-07473-5

Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Wohlfeld's gifts are considerable; she will not be for long 'a fruit/indiscernible to itself'.

Elizabeth Gunderson, Booklist

Her book, winner of the 1994 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, shows why the judge, James Dickey, calls its author 'a female shaman of Eve who takes power over the natural world by naming it,' for Wohlfeld is an adept at defining such natural things as rain, spring, and the sea.

Library Journal

Wohlfeld has ambitious vision and a striking verbal facility to match.

Judith Hall, The Antioch Review

Wohlfeld makes the singed edges of disjunture visible, changing postmodern poetry to prayer.