The Dirt Riddles: Poems - Softcover

Walsh, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1557289255 ISBN 13: 9781557289254

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press, 2010

Synopsis

This powerful first collection and winner of the inaugural $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize is literally rooted in the earth and in the world of animal husbandry. You can taste these poems about life on a family dairy farm in your mouth. In these lyrical poems we meet a closeted young man, his parents, their herd, and the other flora, fauna, and objects that populate his surreal garden.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Walsh is the author of a chapbook, Adam Walking the Garden. He is a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and a residency at the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. A graduate of Knox College and the University of Minnesota (MFA), he works as a course coordinator in the English Department at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is his first book.

From the Inside Flap

This powerful first collection and winner of the inaugural $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize is literally rooted in the earth and in the world of animal husbandry. You can taste these poems about life on a family dairy farm in your mouth. In these lyrical poems we meet a closeted young man, his parents, their herd, and the other flora, fauna, and objects that populate his surreal garden.

Reviews

Walsh’s first book tells us he started out as a farm boy, though on the evidence of three sharply poignant poems in its second part and one in its fourth, he wasn’t on the farm all his growing years. He observed and now remembers deeply and acutely, however, so that his poems about cows and milking, haying and rock picking, feel and taste and smell of that life as well as bring it before us in vivid visual images. He retained, too, the rich connection with a grandmother that animates the three past-as-present poems of “Stalk, Root, Scissors” in the volume’s third part and the past-as-memory poem “Handmade for Disasters” in the fourth. And he recalls how being gay has cropped up in his life, from “First Kisses” to “Bully” in childhood to “Camouflage” and “Pinup” and others in his teens to “On Kissing My Husband at the Gas Station” and “Wish” as a man. Altogether these remarkably well enjambed, short-lined free-verse pieces, whispering and crooning with consonances and assonances, tenderly conjure an integral life. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1557289255
• ISBN 13: 9781557289254
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 74