James Wagner

Who is James Wagner?

James Wagner is an American poet. The poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney wrote that the poems in his first collection, the false sun recordings, "form a semi-coherent push-me/pull-you-type dialogue about stability and wholeness, by turns humorous... and serious. His most recent texts—The Idiocy and Query/Xombies—focus on the searching qualities of human existence, whether through logical argument, or through the medium of the search engine, nominally the modern oracle.

The literary scholar and critic Carla Billitteri has written in an introduction to Wagner’s work given at the University Of Maine:

The quality of Wagner’s own poetry reflect the profound cognitive turn caused by homophonic translations, and reflect Wagner’s translinguistic sensibility—his way of thinking his own language from the vantage point of other languages and other cultures. Thus Wagner’s writing often seems to call us—and demands our attention—from a region close, but not too familiar, a region dislocated in time and languages—a region of radical dislocation.