The Poems

The Poems is an absorbing meditation on the life of verse. In its pages, you witness the poem being born, taking form, growing straight and true, morphing and morphing again, evolving in idiom, metastasizing in lies, gaining remission in honesty, and, healed at last, becoming you.

Epigrammatic and richly allusive, The Poems is a book for those in search of a reading experience beyond immersion, who seek something closer to transubstantiation.

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"In William Walsh's The Poems, the Poem itself is a character, is a plot, is a way in and a way out. The book is an experiment in sound; its musical riffing is a joy to read. It is pithy, open-hearted, rhythmic, seductive, and witty. 'The poem had lost some teeth to years of gnawing. The poem had sturm. The poem had drang, ' he says. Drawing on literature, song, newspapers, life, Walsh creates a world all his own, a world where the Poem is king, lover and challenger. It's a singular achievement sustained over 100+ entrancing pages. Let this line be its statement of purpose: 'The poem's resting heartbeat was love.' It's a heartbeat that sounds like your own, and yet is universal."

-Corey Mesler, author of Memphis Movie and The World is Neither Stacked for You nor Against You

"While the construction of The Poems must be acknowledged-Walsh's skill is undeniable, the use of allusion and other poetic devices masterful-you are immediately in the book, inside its beating, bleeding human heart, and the feeling Walsh's collage of voices creates is something akin to being in love. It is a playful explosion, but also an incantation, a hypnotic spiral; my trance is still lingering. Read it aloud, if you can, and feel the entire world move through you."

-Emily Costa, author of Until It Feels Right and Girl on Girl

"In The Poems, Walsh veers into the oncoming traffic that is hagiography, giving us much less the definition of a poem than its life and the miracles it has performed. 'Yes, the poem was a chancer, ' he writes, reminding us that neither saints nor poems live to old age and die surrounded by their families. Walsh gives us the experience of martyrdom, of living and dying by the line."

-Amish Trivedi, author of FuturePanic and Your Relationship with Motion has Changed