Deed in the Words of Others
“The webbing of West Virginia/n identity, the physicality of West Virginia, the physicality of West Virginians, the physicality of ‘sexual identity’ that dominates any queer subjectivity in the mind of our culture, the identification with and love for place, the land West Virginia has (ironically? sacrificially?) historically given to any corporation promising money or jobs—Wymer’s poems [. . .] follow from strand to strand while at the same time unwinding the cultural and private traps they form.”
from “a shining coil of syllables”: Justin Wymer’s Deed by Dr. Elizabeth Savage in Kestrel
“In Wymer’s Deed, the wilderness—where all life is interconnected and in harmony—reflects and reifies the speaker’s own essential wholeness. Wymer writes: ‘I think myself wheat-colored. Queer. The plants / no longer seem to moan.’ Through the juxtaposition of the description ‘wheat-colored,’ and ‘queer,’ Wymer suggests a relation or a sameness between the behaviors of the plant and the person. Together, they emphasize the gender fluid natural world’s frank self-expression.”
from QUEER AND TRANS POETIC ECOLOGIES: THREE POETS CHALLENGING THE PASTORAL TRADITION by Eliza Flynn-Goodlett in Pleiades
“Justin Wymer is a poet of intensity, whose admirably ambitious debut emphasizes global consciousness, compassion, and the same geologic forces that play a central role in his poetry. [H]is landscapes [. . .] might disorient, but do not forget that disorientation is only your mind's subconscious resistance to reorientation. If DA Powell's Useless Landscape is meant to be a ‘guide’ for boys, Deed is the kind of book we can only hope more boys grow up to write. Let the shear sonic force of Wymer's mycorrhizal speakers take you apart until you:
Try to bow like a dead man petitioning to see grass again.”
“Light is the realm of the lyric, never more than in Justin Wymer’s abundant debut poetry collection, Deed [. . .] An antidote to total darkness, Deed enlightens slantwise, askance. Across its pages, suns glisten, glitter, and glint; stars radiate, reflect, and refract. Dusk falls and dawn breaks. Colorless moths alight on candles; locust casings glow amber against lamps. Something always filters the radiance, an effect by which the poet shows how each of us, indeed everything, is indivisible from its own shadow.”
from Feast of Golds: A Review of Justin Wymer’s DEED in Adroit Journal by Genevieve Arlie
“[I]f poetry doesn’t pull vocabulary back into its ambit then its accomplishments are much diminished. [. . .] In part, too, this moving of the reader corresponds to the way the poems are built about evocations of the state of almost Heraclitan flux in Wymer’s deeply sensual world.”