Survival Expo

Book excerpt: In her inventive new poems, Caki Wikinson meditates, with humor and disarming tenderness, on family, loneliness, and the seemingly endless threats of our age. In her third collection, Caki Wilkinson steers us into flyover country—from its gun shows and high school gyms to the gates of Graceland—as she explores the relationship between fear and self-protection, both the ways we weather the past and how we carry it with us. Through an array of voices and forms, The Survival Expo finds music in the mundane—and hope, too, in the worlds we make to survive the world that made us.