Doors Out of the Underworld (Paperback or Softback)

In Scott Withiam's Doors Out of the Underworld, marvelous things occur: a pear talks to a man and a woman talks to a book. German restaurants dissolve into empty lots and surf clams teach life lessons. His magic touch shines a stark beam into our lives which illuminates both the pains and pleasures of growing older, of discovering more than we knew was there or perhaps wanted to know....

--John Skoyles

I have long been an admiring reader of Scott Withiam's poems and the ways he transforms ordinary incidents and encounters into the deeply human allegory of our days. Like the speaker in the title poem who roams through an auto parts yard amid the strange amid the familiar, these poems seek to salvage and redeem experience. There is a hard-won, well-earned wisdom in Doors out of the Underworld, a remarkable new collection.

--Stewart Dischell

... quest not for the laurel, or the heroic, or the writ large, but for the quirks that are our lives and their obstinate graces and those inexplicable moments when the human imagination overrides ... the seemingly static world from which it derives.... precisely envisioned and always, always, on a roll, the riffs lucidly wild.... They see our follies, our desperation to be happy, and greet our absurdity by inciting the sympathies that so often fail us when lacking the element of surprise.

--Willam Olsen

In Scott Withiam's Doors Out of the Underworld, marvelous things occur: a pear talks to a man and a woman talks to a book. German restaurants dissolve into empty lots and surf clams teach life lessons. His magic touch shines a stark beam into our lives which illuminates both the pains and pleasures of growing older, of discovering more than we knew was there or perhaps wanted to know....

--John Skoyles

I'm a huge fan of Scott Withiam's poetry--he has such a unique voice and sensibility, I can't think of anyone quite like him. In poem after poem he surprises me with unexpected turns and unique insights as he moves gracefully between the real and the surreal, the everyday and the otherworldly. With the ease of a storyteller, the grace of a poet and the wit of a comedian, he is as entertaining as he is brilliant. Like all great poets, his poems linger in the mind long after being read.

--Nin Andrews