Wilder Centuries by Yael Veitz

A poetic exploration of grief and loss, Wilder Centuries is a chapbook-length collection that scatters across a vast, dreamlike, and oddly familiar universe through the narrator’s journey into processing and self-reflection.

Yael Veitz is a New York-based poet whose work has been published in Coffin Bell, Tilde at Thirty West, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Gyroscope Review, among others. A full list of publications can be found at www.yaelveitz.com/publications. Her work reflects her geographically-diverse background, her work in mental health, and, occasionally, her love for her cats.

“Yael Veitz’s Wilder Centuries is a harsh-yet-beautiful catalog of cruelties. Veitz’s words, glazed in a cool and level tone, reveal an animalistic speaker—one who cannot be stopped in their search for retribution. These poems absolutely snarl.” — Veronica Bennett, poet + founder of Bullshit Lit 

“Yael Veitz is a masterful poet. Wilder Centuries is a divine experience. Three lines into this book & it had hooked my soul. I was left to be yanked on its cosmic line through high licks of flame like a fairy in a cartoon—

through hot tar, phantom limbs guiding the way, empty chill of tile, ice fishing for words, starry ballads, pain, agony, music hanging on the back of neon falling down over the horizon as you watch the night bloom, low tide venom, amnesiacs, and the faint slivers of hope that tasted like nectar from paradise on my aching tongue. 

It’s a triumph of bittersweet beauty in the hazy fog of grief & loss. Read Wilder Centuries. You’ll love it.” —Clem Flowers, Poetry Editor of Blue River Review & Author of Stoked & Thrashing and Two Out of Three Falls 

“Yael Veitz’s Wilder Centuries is a character-driven collection fueled in part by a helpless anger: anger at illness, at ageing, at an unjust world filled with unjust constructs. The narrative voice comes at the reader as a parent, a child, a plant, an animal and even the world itself, fueled by the kind of simmering rage that eventually moves borders and topples mountains. Veitz’s poems are sharp, utilizing a ‘barbed-wire wit’ that has no time for luxurious descriptions or pondering plots. The phrases and stanzas are tight and fast and leave the reader gasping for more. ‘Freedom is the only cruelty and the only risk,’ snarls Veitz’s speaker, but as the collection continues there is also acceptance; not that these passionate feelings are meaningless, but that they too have their place in the ecosystem. ‘Hush. Stop your stirring. The world will go to pieces with or without you,’ is the counsel, but it comes with the warning, ‘I was wrought in wilder centuries.’ Reading and experiencing this collection, you will believe it.” — Arden Hunter, EIC of Cutbow Quarterly & Author of Pull Yourself Together and Drifting Bottles