Home is a Sweater by Stefanie Wielkopolan

The word “nostalgia” has its etymological roots in the Greek words nostos, meaning “a return home,” and algos, meaning “pain.” That’s something I think about when I read Stefanie Wielkopolan’s great new collection of poems, Home is a Sweater. Whether set in Pittsburgh, North Carolina, or her native Michigan, Wielkopolan’s poems regularly touch on that struggle we all sometimes encounter with feeling at home. There can be a pain or an ache in returning—to places we no longer inhabit or to memories. But to me the raw and personal poems of this book advocate that there is healing to be found. Despite the harsh realities of our fragile world, we can find hope or a kind of redemption in creation, in humor, in friendship and family. We can find beauty and comfort around us, giving us a sense of belonging, of being home.

–Scott Silsbe, author of Meet Me Where We Survive (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2022)

Wielkopolan’s words slide into the reader’s bloodstream with ease, pulsing with ties to place, people, and human topography. The poet deftly takes us to surprising territory—an art museum with a nearly-blind grandfather, dim sum in New York City, snowy Asheville mountains, Michigan sands, barstools at the Bloomfield Bridge Cafe;  a journey through the contents of her body’s organs where we find the most amazing things: green olives, a red velvet couch, a blue 69 corvette, and a creamy pink block of gelatin; and words: odes to trees, to cafes with old men and books of poetry, to lyrics of regret and hope, and to “areas of transition/ where the broken sidewalks of Pittsburgh/ become the Blue Ridge Mountains of Black Mountain.” Reading Home is a Sweater is like eating a custardy dim sum dumpling, whose taste says “Somedays, I have more hope than others.”

–Jill Moyer Sunday, Chairperson for the English and Foreign Languages Department at Waynesburg University