The Unraveling by Wyn Cooper Review by Sara R. Burnett

The Unraveling by Wyn Cooper

“I Trust the Wind and Don’t Know Why”: Review by Sara R. Burnett

Publisher: White Pine Press

Publication Date: May 12, 2026

ISBN: 9781945680885

Pages: 100

What does it mean to be unraveled? This question is essential to Wyn Cooper’s sixth and masterfully orchestrated collection, The Unraveling (White Pine Press, May 2026). Or another way to put it: what does it mean to “come undone” like the famous 1980s Duran Duran song and its pre-chorus hook “who do you need? who do you love when you’ve come undone?” (It won’t be the first time Cooper is associated with hit songs. He did after all pen the lyrics to Sheryl Crow’s 1993 chart topper “All I Wanna Do” among other songs he’s helped compose). But the pain of disillusionment and its complex relationship with denial is what comes under the microscope here in Cooper’s sharp, exacting gaze.

The process of unraveling — whether that be through the end of a relationship, the disorientation of a collapsing world order, the disintegration of a planet in a climate crisis, or the most individual kind, facing one’s own mortality — is held up like an object to be viewed at all angles. Take the opening poem, for instance, “I Trust the Wind and Don’t Know Why.” Notice how it draws the reader in with its riddle-like first stanza and slippery speaker:

I am not the girl in the picture.

I am not the smell of hyacinths.

I might be the boy.

I am off the record.

Instead of an “I am” poem, this begins as a “I am not” poem. It is driven by negation, i.e. I am not the girl, not the smell of hyacinths, but maybe the boy, and finally a definitive, but not really definitive, I am “off the record,” which is to say something that can’t be shared or documented. After more back and forth between I am/I am not, the poem concludes:

I see the sky but nothing in it,

just spots on the sun.

Then the long twilight.

Then the crackle of stars.

There is a disorientation and an improbability in being able to “see the sky but nothing it” while also being able to see the spots on the sun. The speaker seems to be reaching for what is reliable, what is real and lands on the long twilight and the crackle of stars. Notice how it’s not seeing, but hearing, the stars. Relying on another sense as more real or telling is a theme Cooper returns to in the poems that follow. Sight alone is not to be trusted, and in a world where fake or doctored images and videos are proliferating, this seems increasingly to be a less absurd and more rational response. To trust the wind then feels less like an act of faith even if the speaker doesn’t know why he trusts it. Rather, the speaker is embracing uncertainty and allowing for intuition which provides a kind of road map for living through this period of unraveling.

But noticing the uncertain, shaky ground upon which we tread, upon which we build our egos, our understanding of ourselves and others, is only the first of many illusions we construct or encounter. The end of a relationship (whether through death or a more ambiguous end, both of which are handled in this collection) also chips away at our certitudes. In the poem, “Smoke,” for example, the speaker is beside his dying father as he asks for a last cigarette. The speaker says:

I could hear the morphine purring

in his veins, could feel it in my own.

I lit his cigarette.

Smoke curled up to the ceiling

of what had been my bedroom.

Then it was gone.

The illusion of bodily permanence is starkly, painfully revealed, and in that moment, also transferred to the son who “could feel it in my own.” For nothing like the passing of a parent  insists we face a fact that we mostly ignore: that our time on earth (at least in our corporeal form) is limited. In this light, denial seems like an essential part of the human condition.

The process of disillusionment, however, is not all gloom, and this is where Cooper generously extends his gaze by including a poem like “Vapors.” “Vapors” is a short poem of six fragmented couplets built upon knowledge gleaned not from sight, but from scent, perhaps like the wind, something that is more trustworthy. Here is the poem in its entirety:

The scent of mint outside the crematorium—

sufficient incentive to travel.

Yellow Vespas on Florentine streets—

exhaust the blue of Tuscan sky.

Body odor on the Marseilles metro—

Provençal musk sans lavender.

Islay peat slow-burning, medicinal—

shrouded in whiskey’s secrecy.

Cedar smoke from New England chimneys—

bucolic aphrodisiac.

Rosemary shampoo in an outdoor shower—

her black Mediterranean hair.

This is a kind of illusion most are happy to receive. I will, for example, gladly block the musky scent of body odor on a metro and reframe it as “Provençal musk sans lavender.” And isn’t it true also how a scent can remind us, almost to the point of deceiving us, of another person’s presence, in this case, a woman with “her black Mediterranean hair”? As the saying goes, “the nose knows.”

What The Unraveling does not shy away from is the reckoning that comes with holding onto these deceptions, gleefully self-imposed or otherwise. Eventually the facades we build, the illusions we maintain, do not hold up. It’s both exhausting and exhaustive, as Cooper highlights, throughout the book. In the poem, “The White Skins of Balloons,” a litany poem of “the barrage of human garbage” that piles up and the consequences of humanity’s careless treatment of the planet, the unsustainable belief that the earth can just go on forever is shown to reach a breaking point. Even this earth is subjected to “that distant rumor,” death.

If The Unraveling were to come to rest on some certain ground, some point of focus as to where we are heading, as the institutions around us crumble, as the temperature and sea levels rise, as things get more and more chaotic, it would, frankly, be another illusion. Thankfully, it doesn’t. The question that continues to haunt me as we come undone is underscored in the poem “Questionnaire,” a poem in the form of questions all end-stopped with periods: “Are you crossing the bridge or lighting it on fire.” Swap “you” for “me” and you will see what I mean. Are we crossing the bridge or are we lighting it on fire. Are we living in, as the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy coined, “The Great Unraveling,” a period of transformation only possible after the disintegration of systemic, biological, and ecological systems, or are we headed toward something darker and unsustainable? It seems to me that the process of naming, of embodying that kind of deep recognition of this unraveling as evoked in Cooper’s poems, is essential. Essential as well to answering that Duran Duran question: who do you need, who do you love when you’ve come undone?

Wyn Cooper has published five books of poetry prior to The Unraveling, as well as a novel, Way Out West. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as in 25 anthologies of poetry, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Many of his poems have been turned into songs, including by Sheryl Crow, David Broza, and Madison Smartt Bell. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation. He lives in Vermont.

Sara R. Burnett is the author of Seed Celestial (2022), winner of the 2021 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. She has been published in Barrow Street, Copper Nickel, PANK, Prairie Schooner, RHINO and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland, and a MA in English Literature from the University of Vermont, and is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She also writes picture books. Since November 2024, she curates a bi-weekly Substack of 3-5 poems of resilience. She lives in Maryland with her family.

30 September 2026