Games for Children (Paperback or Softback)

Finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award

“A restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. A game-changing book.”—Rosalie Moffett, judge of the 2024 National Poetry Series

Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them. The Uncanny Valley diagram is repurposed to imagine a future Emmett Till never saw; visual instructions for line dancing stand in tension with the history of picking cotton; prayer is input as equation; a poem gerrymanders a sentence diagram. In these and other gestures, Wilson expands the possibility of what poetry can hold.

Thematically expansive and materially ambidextrous, Games for Children demonstrates how play is one of the highest forms of freedom, and in reclaiming it, our most tender truths are exposed.

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He was a Gregory Djanikian Scholar, and his poetry has won the Rumi Prize and been anthologized in Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Wilson’s book Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love was recognized by The New York Times as a best new book of poetry. He lives in Chicago.