The Fool Sings (Paperback or Softback)

In her debut collection The Fool Sings, poet Weslea Sidon bevels the sharp edges of love and loss with compassion and wit. These concise and honest poems reveal the great impact of small moments in a life well observed.

These poems are plainspoken but they do not settle for easy answers; they are smart and sometimes deliciously snarky, but always looking past smartness towards real wisdom; they are in the language we really speak, yet apt at any moment to break into song; capable of cutting you off at the knees, yet (usually) letting you instead walk gloriously free. These poems are real. They can almost teach you how to live, and certainly can show you—at times, shockingly clearly—how you are already living.
--Christian Barter, author of In Someone Else’s House and The Singers I Prefer

Weslea Sidon’s poems are in two places at once: they shift yet cling, observe yet participate. Again and again Sidon transposes the quotidian and the tragic. In "seful Information," she transforms standard charts of information into a map of loss. In "Blueberry Time," her omniscient eye moves among a handful of characters, revealing their botched assumptions and expectations—tenderly, ironically, ruthlessly. She doesn’t take sides, but neither does she avoid them. The patient cadence of these poems is a mark, I think, of how loath the poet is to draw a final conclusion. At the same time her perceptions are subtle and exact, drawing me inexorably into her quiet, terrible, beautiful landscapes. "There is nothing else," she writes: "A gust, a drift, unfettered snow; / ice bound stairs as insurmountable as glaciers / and a door / beyond a solid sea."
--Dawn Potter, author of Same Old Story and editor of A Poet’s Sourcebook