ISBN 978-0-578-46484-8 (4.625” x 7”, 104 pp, lithocase hardcover) | Poetry
With 16 illustrations by Cody Coppernoll

The case of Wagner recounted here collects fragments from handwritten notebooks kept in the years following his death. The result is a poem that tracks many generations of Wagners, including a young Wagner who accidentally severed part of his finger as a child, a series of teenage Wagners coming of age in suburban America, and the son of Wagner, who suddenly learns of his father’s secret family, and soon finds himself the father of his own.


Praise for The Wagners

“This vivid, strange, and beautiful book put me in mind of Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and the work of the Russian Daniil Kharms. Like those works, it made me look at the world more carefully and more affectionately, and feel more inclined to see the magic in it.”

—George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo

“The Wagners is the most neat and elegant collection of outrageous surprises I’ve seen yet. Like the illustrations that appear throughout the book, each vignette is as bold and simple yet foreign as a letter from an extraterrestrial alphabet. Reading The Wagners is like receiving your first explanation of bestiality from Mr. Rogers as he perfectly folds his collection of sweaters.”

—Sarah Galvin, author of Ugly Time

“The Wagners is an elegiac meditation on the egregore. Or, rather, imagine this: a semiomniscient entity takes notes to try & make sense of our lives. This is an intense multidimensional anthropological assessment, by way of memetic engineering & sociological investigation, by way of black magick & in-the-clouds prose.”

—Mike Kleine, author of Mastodon Farm

“The Wagners will set itself inside you. Read it again and again, that is how things will go. ‘Once, he sat up in bed, shook with rage, and threatened to tell me something that I would not believe.’ Oh I believe it and so will you!”

—CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank