Far Enough

Joe Wilkins's debut, KILLING THE MURNION DOGS, was published by Black Lawrence in 2011 and subsequently named a finalist for a number of national post-publication book awards, including the Paterson Poetry Prize and the High Plains Book Award. Wilkins's other books include a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing up on the Big Dry(Counterpoint 2012), winner of a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award—n honor that has previously recognized early works by the likes of Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and Alice Munro, among others—nd another book of poems, NOTES FROM THE JOURNEY WESTWARD (White Pine 2012). He has recently published two chapbooks, one of essays, We Had to Go On Living (Red Bird Chapbooks 2014) and one of poetry, Leviathan (Iron Horse 2014). Wilkins's latest book is Far Enough: A Western in Fragments, a chapbook of short fiction from Black Lawrence Press (2015). Wilkins lives with his wife, son, and daughter in McMinnville, Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College.

Though Joe Wilkins's new collection of short fiction set under the big Montana sky may have all the trappings of a traditional Western-long shots of sage flats and blue mountains, late nights at the dingy local watering hole, and a hard-working cowboy making time with the boss's daughter-FAR ENOUGH is far from traditional. A series of short prose fragments told from several viewpoints, FAR ENOUGH follows Willie Benson, Wade Newman, and young Jackie Newman as they crisscross the high plains of eastern Montana, each searching for something to hold onto. Wilkins's narratives-splintered, wending, intertwined-sprawl out beneath a huge, dazzling sky filled with "blue lightning run the wrong way, red eruptions and the slow fade to gold, a white ache along the horizon." Poetic, darkly humorous, subversive-FAR ENOUGH is a Western for our time.