The Keeper

Joshua Wilkerson

Joshua Wilkerson’s book-length prose poem The Keeper centers on a dissolved identity, a life-altering accident, and the itinerant preceding years. A series of (mis-)translations of Fernando Pessoa’s poems—particularly those of his “heteronym” Alberto Caeiro—punctuate the text, which maps infrastructures of disintegration onto questions of selfhood, friendship, and home.

"Is this silence or drilling? Joshua Wilkerson’s recombinant, shifting, translations of Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro wind and shift, and butt up against, extraction economies and shipping logistics, over instant messenger and on Anki. Like the shifting sign of the sunflower, the poems here drift and double back, widening and closing the gap between languages, as the central impossibility of translation transmutes into the central impossibility of personhood, or as Pessoa writes, the reflective vest. As Caeiro, Pessoa, and Mário de Sá-Carneiro are refracted through Wilkerson’s shifting, lucid forms, the reader is refracted into a waking dream of empty strip malls and freeways. Thanks to Wilkerson, we’re all doing the Pessoa não." —Terrence Arjoon