Secret Addressee | David Wojahn | Essays
Secret Addressee: Essays on How Poetry Matters, is David Wojahn’s third collection of essays on poetry. Secret Addressee is at once a sweeping and conscientious analysis of poetry’s importance in the context of heightened cultural politics and rapidly mutating communication. This careful scrutiny is matched by moving personal narrative and engaging storytelling.
Literary Editors and Reviewers: If you would like to request an advance reading copy of David Wojahn’s Secret Addressee, please contact us directly.
$28.00
Description
Secret Addressee: Essays on How Poetry Matters, David Wojahn
$28.00
ISBN: 9798991957571
Fine Softcover; 280 pages; 6″x9″
Publication Date: November 11, 2025
Summary
Secret Addressee: Essays on How Poetry Matters, is David Wojahn’s third collection of essays on poetry. Addressee is at once a sweeping and conscientious analysis of poetry’s importance in the context of heightened cultural politics and rapidly mutating communication. This careful scrutiny is matched by moving personal narrative and engaging storytelling.
Of Wojahn’s 2015 collection of criticism, From the Valley of Making, Lisa Russ Spaar wrote, “Fearless, honest, witty, ferociously smart, pop-culturally savvy, and in possession of a prodigious, wide-ranging intellect, Wojahn can travel in any one piece among the likes of Quentin Tarantino, St. Teresa of Avila, and reality TV with a dazzling, perspicuous brio that leaves the reader newly alive to language, the world and the self.”
Author
David Wojahn is the author of two previous collections of essays on contemporary poetry and nine collections of verse, among them Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1983-2004, a Named Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and World Tree, winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize. His awards and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for The Arts, and the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He lives in Richmond Virginia, where he is Professor Emeritus at Virginia Commonwealth University, and a faculty member of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Praise for Secret Addressee
“David Wojahn’s superb new book of poetry commentary, Secret Addressee: Essays on How Poetry Matters, is an instruction and a balm. Wojahn writes with both historical depth and aesthetic breadth, shifting from his devoted experience as a teacher and a parent to his discernment as a poet to his profound admiration for other poets, like Robert Hayden and Elizabeth Bishop. With precision he sets his readings alongside the political conundrums of the days in question — and our of day. In fact, we seem more proficient at squibs, blurbs, and the self-fulfilling promotions of social media than we are at sustained, thoughtful critical assessments like Wojahn’s. His is one of the rare voices to whom I turn for a ranging intelligence, discernment, and powerfully engaged critical sense. David Wojahn helps me think about what, how, and why I read.”
David Baker
“David Wojahn is a critic of richness and spontaneity, a wisdom-seeker whose thinking sounds like the improvisation of a disciplined musician. Secret Addressee will make his essential contribution to American poetry known to readers everywhere. The essays of the book situate the vocation of poetry in American culture. Tenaciously, and honestly, they ask poetry to account not just for itself but for its world. ‘Against the Laureates of the Lie’ offers an expansive scheme for understanding political verse. ‘The Quietest Voice in the Room’ gives American poet Robert Hayden the laurels he always deserved. This work will teach you with such compassion, joy, and intuition that you might even forget our current credo that all hope is lost.”
Katie Peterson
“In the essays collected as Secret Addressee, David Wojahn has discovered a cosmos at the margins, and that cosmos proves to be a universal of one: one reader, one writer, and each a point and poem of inexhaustible origin. Through Wojahn’s eyes, one can literally see Whitman’s promises fulfilled. Here is an advocacy of promise both sustained and sustaining. And here is an unapologetically contemporary voice of that promise — emphatic, forceful and yet entirely without malice or partisanship. I had almost forgotten that the conversation of poetry can be ennobling. Secret Addressee proves that it can.”
Donald Revell
Reviews | ARCs Available
Literary Editors and Reviewers:
If you would like to request an advance reading copy of David Wojahn’s Secret Addressee, please contact us directly.
