The Sisters
Black Ocean, 2024
A lyric meditation on childhood, adulthood, parenting, grief, fear, and joy, The Sisters is a book of prose poems that began as bedtime stories. A kaleidoscopic invocation of imagined lives, these poems transform familiar myths, fables, and fairy tales into whimsical worlds that are a bit more fragile and bit more true.
Through a series of prose poems, and complementary, hand-drawn illustrations by sculptor and visual artist, Deanna Dorangrichia, The Sisters confronts what it means to raise children and grow up amid climate catastrophes, insistent threats of gender-based violence, and the shocks of late-stage capitalism. These are ethereal and eerie stories full of torn edges, a series of dazzling lullabies that will soothe you awake.
“Windholz’s elegant, imaginative prose poems are mesmerizingly spectral—not like a ghost but like a spectrum of light.”
“Jordan Windholz’s second book, a collection of prose poems about the two sisters of the title, offers elegant, poetic tales that echo aspects of the bedtime story but end up on the other side of Aesop and Grimm, in the imaginative spaces reserved for grown-up poets with a taste for Calvino and Pessoa.”
Other Psalms
Winner of the 2015 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry
University of North Texas Press, 2015
In his debut collection, Jordan Windholz recasts devotional poetics and traces the line between faith and its loss. Other Psalms gives voice to the skeptic who yet sings to the silence that “swells with the noise of listening.” If faith is necessary, this collection suggests, it is necessary as material for its own unmaking.Without a doubt, these are poems worth believing in, announcing, as they do, a new and necessary voice in American poetry.
“Ambitious and exigent, these poems are refreshingly alert to all of the formal necessities of contemporary poetry, recognizing the inadequacy of any single measure to encompass the human longing for presence.”
“Jordan Windholz’s Other Psalms harmonizes reverie and reverence.”
The Single Life
Strode Studies in Early Modern Literature and Culture
UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS, 2025
What if the Renaissance bachelor wasn’t just a social outlier but a literary lens through which early modern masculinity reveals its cracks? In The Single Life: Unpatriarchal Manhoods in English Renaissance Literature, Jordan Windholz examines the overlooked and often subversive roles played by never-married men in shaping gender, sexuality, and social order.
Windholz challenges conventional views on gender and sexuality, identifying five archetypes of bachelorhood that complicate our understanding of patriarchal success: the chaste youth, the journeyman bachelor, the true gallant, the incel scholar, and the unmarried eunuch. These figures don’t conform to ideals of marriage, legacy, or economic productivity, but they also weren’t merely left behind. Instead, they served to define what early modern society valued by embodying what it resisted. Windholz shows how Renaissance texts constructed, contained, and occasionally celebrated these “unpatriarchal manhoods.”
By examining the intersections of sexuality, labor, gentility, emotion, and gender, the book provides a nuanced understanding of how single men both upheld and resisted patriarchal norms. Each chapter offers a detailed analysis of literary texts, blending historical and literary analysis with feminist and queer theory. The first study of its kind, Windholz’s work is essential reading for anyone interested in Renaissance literature, gender studies, or those looking to understand the margins of masculinity and the meanings of singledom—then and now.
“Focusing on the critically neglected category of unmarried men and judiciously engaging with recent work on queerness, transgender studies, and race, The Single Life significantly advances our understanding of manhood, marriage, and sexuality in early modern English drama and culture.”
“The Single Life has breadth and ambition, and it takes seriously the relevance of early modern literature to theoretical conversations that are often confined to contemporary texts.”