A Season

Reviews / Votes

With precision and quiet plenitude, Michael Joseph Walsh stages and disintegrates decadent and lyrical modes, now languorous, now in 'sudden bloom.' A Season elaborates a microclimate of self-alienation which inverts to its most surprising hypocrite double: sympathy. Against all expectations, the drunken boat finds its needle, and 'with astonishment, propels itself along,' 'into the heart like a cool green sea.' -- Joyelle McSweeney * author of Death Styles * Maybe, I think to myself, Michael Joseph Walsh is amnesia's Proust. In his exhilarating second book, a person is born seemingly right into adulthood, drenched in experience and yet somehow innocent-unknown to himself but known to the world that forms him the way 'vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf.' The bracing syntax and haptic precisions of this lyrist feel corporeally intimate, earthbound and giddy, ever on the exuberant cusp of-dare one say it?-beauty, of 'autonomy, [. . .] an enormous ray / Of sunlight / Which is the buzz of coming back online.' -- Aditi Machado * author of Material Witness * A mesmerizing, slow burn of a book, A Season is deeply inquisitive and mercurial at once. In whirling, diaristic movement sheared by sand and 'semi-snow,' by a face 'at the speed of thought,' its warped and wefted sequences scrutinize foreignness, the human body, the 'apparitional surge' of self and other. The architecture here is beautifully tensioned, built on rollers for allowing flux under panicky conditions, whether social or metaphysical, telluric or psychosomatic. Ever approaching a volatile edge, Walsh's lyric nightwalking keeps us oneirically awake, unwilling to break with 'a myriad world's arrangement risk and sun.' -- Andrew Zawacki * author of These Late Eclipses and Unsun: f/11 * A Season is unlike anything I have ever read before. Musical, imaginative, and utterly surprising, Walsh's poems unfurl like a study in estrangement or the map of a consciousness within a dream: 'song, pantomime, song, slow fire.' This book lets us touch the pain and ecstasy we might find while parsing a strange world, the wonder we might feel bringing language to a place where we are not at home. -- Jessica Tanck * author of Winter Here *