Publications – Wendy Marie Vergoz

Book

The Unbinding

Available at Amazon and Wipf and Stock Publishers

The Unbinding chronicles a woman’s experience of finding her way out of a twenty-year marriage marked by domestic violence, as well as her continued unbinding from trauma. Settings and images of everyday life provide a gateway into a remarkable journey, the telling of which is vivid and dark, yet ultimately hopeful. The woman at the center of this journey survives due to her children—a manifestation to her of grace in the world—and her grit.

Essays

« Ma Lettre d’Amour pour le 29 avenue Robert Schuman, un École de la Langue Française, » Et j’ai su que ce trésor était pour nous, Aix-Marseille Université

Poems

“Vinalhaven Ferry, Siren Song,” “Funnels Made of Silk,” “Listen,”
“Filled with Ladders, the World”
“Bitter Vision”
“A Geometry of Falling”
“Eddie and Donald”
“Bully in a Backward Collar,” “Sanctuary,” “Sanctuary 2,” and “Stuff”
“The Blueberry Hill Pancake House”
“Anna’s Lament”
“The Sound”
“Numbers,” “Sanctuary,” and “Ask Me”
“His First Wife” and “Popsicle” 50/50: Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50, Quills Edge Press
“Whiplash” and “Ghazal to Prey No More,” Dystrumpian Almanac
Editor, The Unleavened Bread Cafe: Twenty Years of Living Water
“Magdalena’s Song,” Ground
“An Evening at the Church Redemption Film Series,” Ground
“What’s to Happen,” Ground
“The Leonids,” Anglican Theological Review
“Pink Impatiens,” Anglican Theological Review
“No Matter,” Art of the Moving Image & Spoken Word
“Cuyahoga County, November,” Anglican Theological Review
“Now,” The Christian Century
“Ash Wednesday, New Gambier Road,” Anglican Theological Review
“Visitation,” The Christian Century

Book Reviews

Book Review: Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature, Ed. Jill Peláez Baumgaertner. Anglican Theological Review
Book Review: Tolstoy in Love, by Ray Givans. Anglican Theological Review
Book Review: Divine Margins, by Peter Cooley. Anglican Theological Review

Book Editing

Editor, The Unleavened Bread Cafe: Twenty Years of Living Water
Editor, Voices Unlocked: Soulful Stories from 30^th and Central
Editor, From a Kid’s Life: A Collection of Poetry by Bromwell Students. Co-Editor, Steve Replogle

“Wendy Vergoz’s poetry is an important and compelling eyewitness to the trauma of abuse. Breaking silence and shame, Vergoz gives powerful voice to the bound and wounded soul that discovers its ultimate unbinding and healing. This is a critical collection that deserves a wide audience.”

“The Unbinding is a beautifully controlled cycle of poems depicting the abuse of a woman and its effects by a clergyman husband. Powerful, moving, and liberating for both poet and reader, it will inspire other women to tell their stories and enlighten men. The title sequence, in which the author communes as victim with Isaac, son of Abraham, is a brilliant gem that transforms her into a survivor whose truth-telling opens the way to healing.”

“Vergoz’s poetry sings with grief and rage. It vividly shows the desecration caused by rape and domestic violence and speaks truth with absolute courage. This healing testimony links personal to political, and inner to outer world. Here is both the story of one woman’s determined journey toward healing and a starkly honest narrative of cultural violence affecting all women’s lives.”

“Even though the poetic style is quite different, I am reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets,’ filled with angst and doubt and the torture of God’s silence. Wendy Vergoz rehearses these themes, which are as old as poetry itself, but she asks the questions in a new context, startling, disturbing, anchored in the fallen world but simultaneously reaching toward a particularly elusive deus absconditus.”

“Wendy Vergoz’s The Unbinding captures the loneliness and isolation, the rage and confusion of an abusive marriage in vivid, disquieting imagery that at times piles up and contradicts and interrupts itself, as if the words themselves are trying to understand what happened to her. Yet, throughout, she finds a blessed thread of grace in small moments with her children and in the natural world. The urgency, rawness, courage, and luminosity in Vergoz’s story of abuse are great and necessary gifts, not only to those who have experienced it, but to those of us who love them and want to support them in reclaiming their lives.”