Jordan Windholz
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Jordan Windholz
@jwindholz.bsky.social
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Prof at Shippensburg U, Shax and Renaissance Lit. Author of The Single Life, out now from University of Alabama Press, and the poetry collections Other Psalms (Vassar Miller Prize), and The Sisters (Black Ocean). www.jordanwindholz.com
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jwindholz.bsky.social
My monograph on renaissance bachelors is out today. It's got chaste lil' guys, fancy bros, capitalist conmen, sulky incels, and sexy eunuchs! Check it out at www.uapress.ua.edu/978081736213..., and use BAMA at checkout for 30% off.
A flyer promoting The Single Life by Jordan Windholz, out from the University of Alabama Press. The book description reads: "Examines the overlooked and often subversive roles that never-married men have played in shaping gender norms, sexual identities, and the social order." Includes a portion of Isaac Oliver's Young Man Seated Under a Tree. A flyer promoting The Single Life by Jordan Windholz, out from the University of Alabama Press. A blurb from Mario DiGangi, author of The Winter's tale: Language and Writing, reads: "The Single Life significantly advances our understanding of manhood, marriage, and sexuality in early modern English drama and culture." Includes a portion of Isaac Oliver's Young Man Seated Under a Tree. A flyer providing a long description of Windholz's The Single Life. It includes contact information and a link to the University of Alabama press, and a promotional code of BAMA to receive 30% off at checkout.
July 15, 2025 at 6:14 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
I’ll be reading with Megan Pinto and Eduardo Martínez-Leyva at The Word is Change in Brooklyn, this Friday, April 18th! The reading is sponsored by @pw.org If you’re around, come on out!
A poster for a poetry reading by Megan Pinto, Eduardo Martínez-Leyva and Jordan Windholz at The Word is Change in Brooklyn, NY, 368 Tompkins Ave, on Friday April 18th. The reading is sponsored by Poets and Writers and NYC Cultural Affairs.
April 16, 2025 at 11:17 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
The Sisters as Collaborators. Last One. Wrote this with Hazel, years ago.
A black and white illustration of a coastline. In the foreground are two whale flukes, and in the mid-ground is a beach cliff, with two cabins up on the hill. The sky has two, small birds flying in the distance. A poem, "The Sisters as Collaborators." It reads: The whales were diving. Their memory was an egg bereft of its wren. The sun was shining so brightly on the water. The salt was all the wind was thinking. The sisters were old houses creaking on the coast, lighthouses for shipwrecks. Do you hear them, the dolphins like mice, the dolphins like happy leopards? What is an ocean for? Swimming. Fishing. The blue dog running on the hot sand. The sisters read their book in the permanent noon. It is funny.
December 2, 2024 at 12:47 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
The Sisters on a Country Road
A black and white illustration of two young girls looking at a dead fox in the road. The fox is in the center, and each girl is to the left and to the right of it. In the background is a field, and beyond that field is a mountain range. A poem, "The Sisters on a Country Road." It reads: Where comes that violence born of boredom, the man or boy who swerves his truck out of its lane in the night to strike the fox now stunned in the sudden, roaring brightness? Is it, like a cloud, a condensing, or like a wind, a pressure shifting? Is it whim or whimsy or whimper? The sisters stood on the side of the road staring at the rusty pelt, its organs inky in the unspeakable heat. A breeze stirred its fur. It was not hard to imagine it in its den, asleep in its animal sleep, oblivious to that instant terror, to the veering machine on a road beckoning someone home.
December 1, 2024 at 12:46 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
The Sisters in the Attic
A black and white illustration of an attic. There is a four pane windhow in the center of the image, and a portion of bed spring barely visible in the lower left. To the bed-spring's right, there is a stack of boxes. Just above the bed-spring is a pile of shattered glass. The back wall is brick, the floor wood, and the beams at the top of the image rise toward the roof's pitch. A poem, "The Sisters in the Attic." It reads: They were not yet crusted in dust, and so they imagined themselves as memories or dreams, as the ravenous thoughts of the house, rising and circling like vultures. They would stomp and growl, jump and pound on the floor. They heard the lilt of human questions from below, their parents querying after them. They didn’t have long before they were discovered, before they must be girls again. One put on a wig that she might practice tearing out her hair, the other a wedding gown that she might rehearse its tattering, make of it a lantern for the flame her body would be. They placed glass bowls to their ears, whispered into them. When they heard the creak of the attic door opening, they dropped them to the floor, the globes shattering, their secrets scattering, and so, safe.
November 30, 2024 at 2:24 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
The Sisters in the Desert West
A black and white illustration of a U.S. Western desert landscape at night. The sky is covered in starts, and the scene shows undulating hills of sandstone. In the foreground are two, small figures in sleeping bags. A poem, "The Sisters in the Desert West." It reads: Coyotes yip, and the night opens into a bright coolness. They fall asleep under the stars, which are meaningless, if beautiful. There are so many.
November 29, 2024 at 1:51 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
The Sisters as the History of Blue
A black and white illustration of two dragon flies facing each other. Their wings are closed. A prose poem, "The Sisters as the History of Blue." It reads: Like a dragonfly dipping the tip of its tail on the hood of a hot car, you have to be a lover of likenesses to see them. The sky is like the sea, a glass’s looking. The sister like a sister. Say you place blue between them. What are they now? A tilting, perhaps. A petal in shade. A coast flowering in ice. You might say there is a wind in the glacier, a light in the wind. The iceberg in the sea, the sky in the light. You might say. What would you? They are so green with likeness, you have to look at them to see it. The dragonfly still on a green stalk flickers into the speed of a color. The sky calving into the sea, the sea so much vapor cooling into clouds. They are so blue with difference, you have to look at them to forget. What you cannot see is blue, like forgetting. Or the dragonflies unzipping the air. You have to look to see. Do you? Do you look?
November 28, 2024 at 12:08 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
The Sisters as Ghosts
A black and white illustration of a rib cage. There is a lung on the right side of the rib cage. There are two bees, one in the lower left flying, and the other in the upper right, on the lung. Below the ribcage in the lower right, there appears a kind of plant growth. The rib cage and the bees are surrounded by dirt or earth. Haunting was such boring work, and it didn’t take long before they questioned why it was they were living the stories that the sobbing and fearful wrote to make sense of the grave. How presumptuous to assume ghosts had nothing better to do than fling a few books across a room, bang doors, breathe on the smalls of backs. They did all these things at first, of course. But the world was too full of new experiences, which were just old ones that had shed their familiarity. Remembering a spring day when some bees welted their bodies and ballooned their eyes shut, they floated outside, harassed a hive in the yard, and marveled how the swarm spun in their chests in a honey-drunk rage, and then, as if slipping into the amnesia of a suddenly recollected routine, the bees dispersed out their eyes, their noses, their mouths, elbows, their bellies, and once again groomed themselves in pollen and gorged themselves with nectar. Instead of climbing trees, the sisters sat inside an oak, felt the pull and push of the pith through their vaporous spines. They felt the heartwood tighten. They suspended and stretched themselves thin through rock strata, their heads deep in the Cambrian, their toes lengthening out across the Permian and pushing up into soil like tulip bulbs rolling into bloom. Their days went on like this until what remained was the enduring question of what they were. They probed their substanceless forms with substanceless fingers, contemplated the unlogic of spectral physics. Day turned into day and into day, and their questions of unbeing became a flood that floated their every thought until they were perpetually living in that moment of searching for the right word, standing forever on that edge of hoping that what they were feeling would exorcise their language of its alphabet, that what whatever was left would séance out of them what they were.
November 27, 2024 at 1:24 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
The Sisters as Two Among the Many
A black and white illustrations of a table from above. On the table are two cups of coffee and two eggs, sunny-side up, on two plates. On the upper left, a hand, wrinkled with age, comes into the frame, cutting the egg on the plate. A cup of coffee is just above that plate. On the right, another hand, also wrinkled with age, comes into the frame to hold the cup of coffee. A shadow cuts diagonally across the table, downard from the upper left to the lower right. A poem, "The Sisters as Two Among the Many." It reads: People are waking up to being people again, and the sisters, too, are pouring their coffee and eating their eggs. There is a feeling that rises in them that makes them want to say what the light is, but it is just the light. The air warps into the chemistry of breathing, and they are, for now, breathing the warped air. When they think back on this day, it will be a kind of accident. They will have wanted to remember a day this meaningless, a day that they lived in without it having to have been a day like any other, without it having to be a day unlike every other, the light just so on the sills, the wind making a door of itself through the streets.
November 26, 2024 at 12:42 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
The Sisters in a Hockney Painting
An illustration of a pool, in the style of a David Hockney painting. A diving board is in the foreground, and there is a row of low hedges in the back. The perimeter of the pool is a stone border. Two people are diving into the pool, but only their feet are showing as they enter the water. A poem, "The Sisters in a Hockney Painting." The poem reads: They are the pink arms of summer. They are the diving board hot for the splash. They are the absent yellows. Look at me, David, they are saying. Let me be your David. Let me be your patio. They are Joe by the Green Window. They are the pleasant, eclectic décor. They are Johnny and Lindsay. They are the palms and shrubs all too green. They are so many ways of looking all at once. They almost see the sun in them. Everywhere the water, and a body sliding through, sliding through a body like it’s the coolness of a pool.
November 25, 2024 at 1:27 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
The Sisters as Regicides
A black and white illustration of a crown and a blood-soaked robe. The crown sits on the crown to the left. The its right, there is what appears to be a pool of blood, with a spattering of blood all around it, and a clear, small handprint just below the large pool. A poem. The title reads, "The Sisters as Regicides." The body reads: It didn’t surprise them, exactly, how cleanly the blade slipped between the bones of his neck, how, with just the slightest heft of their bodies on the hilt, his screaming—like a child’s, really—cratered into a singular whimper, then a wheeze. With his head off, the King—but was it right to call him that now?—was nothing more than what all corpses are: a heap of flesh, a sinewy mess, time’s ragged lace. It was a mistake, they had come to realize, to allow him the Tyrian purple stole of his coronation. They had been sentimental, had pitied the old man. Splayed across the platform, it sopped up the blood like a leech. It was ruined. Upon the scaffold, they understood why it is one wears a crown. They dipped their hands in the crimson coagulating around their feet and placed their sticky palms over their hearts. When they held up his head, the crowd cheered. Their fingers clutching its wispy hair, it was heavy, but not too heavy, not too heavy.
November 24, 2024 at 11:58 AM
jwindholz.bsky.social
From The Sisters:
An illustration of a left hand, partially open, with a sprig of thyme and ribbon tied together laying across the hand. A poem, "The Sisters as Nuns," It reads: And so, they aren’t what they aren’t, but are errant prayers, error’s heirs, tidbits and habits, clothed doors. Their obedience is a testimony of the right to exit today, their poverty a giving over as much as a giving up or going under, a bit of thyme stitched into the clove’s hitch. Every day they gather like cloying oysters at a convenient hour. The lit wicks of their motives flicker like whispers in the ear of god. They have no rulers. They are superior mothers. What lives in them is the upturned sound of an upside-down letter.
November 23, 2024 at 12:56 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
My book, The Sisters, has been out a month today, so I thought that over the next few days I might post a few of the poems and their accompanying illustrations. Here's the first pairing.
A black and white illustration of two young girls approaching a bonfire. The girls are in silhouette. It is night. Above them, in each corner, are two crescent moons, waxing on the left, waning on the right. A poem, "The Sisters in the Night." It reads: Together, but they didn’t know how they arrived, in the center, or where they could imagine the center, of a dark forest, howls with teeth in them, a grey silence that ate their questions. They didn’t even know if they were the villains, the wayward, the weird, the witches cursed to conjure sprites and devilish curs, if they were an ancient magic feeding saplings into a heretic bonfire, its pillar of wet, white smoke rising like a spell. The sky was black above them, stuck with stars that seemed the pinpricks of a bloodletting, their hot light hissing and steaming in the mists snaking through the woods. The moon was a sister of what they didn’t know. They were not afraid. They had knives beneath their muslin, amethyst charms, a language that bent the world back to wishing. They imagined whatever was next was a perch with a nest of mottled eggs in its maw, a birthing of naked, flying forms or a tender meal for skulking cats.
November 22, 2024 at 12:07 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
And here’s one of the poems (some have illustrations). The cover image is derived from this one, which I am posting for no particular reason.
Image of a poem, The Sisters as Regicides. It reads: t didn’t surprise them, exactly, how cleanly the blade slipped between the bones of his neck, how, with just the slightest heft of their bodies on the hilt, his screaming—like a child’s, really—cratered into a singular whimper, then a wheeze. With his head off, the King—but was it right to call him that now?—was nothing more than what all corpses are: a heap of flesh, a sinewy mess, time’s ragged lace. It was a mistake, they had come to realize, to allow him the Tyrian purple stole of his coronation. They had been sentimental, had pitied the old man. Splayed across the platform, it sopped up the blood like a leech. It was ruined. Upon the scaffold, they understood why it is one wears a crown. They dipped their hands in the crimson coagulating around their feet and placed their sticky palms over their hearts. When they held up his head, the crowd cheered. Their fingers clutching its wispy hair, it was heavy, but not too heavy, not too heavy.
November 16, 2024 at 3:29 PM
jwindholz.bsky.social
Oh hey Bluesky folks, I published a little book of prose poems. If you like fairy tales and bedtime stories, you might just like this book. They have a little hope and a little hopelessness. You can order it from www.blackocean.org/catalog1/sis....
A cover image of a book of poems, The Sisters. The cover features a hand drawn yellow crown in the lower left with a mass of red blood and hand prints to the right.
November 16, 2024 at 3:25 PM