Waste Management Facility (Paperback or Softback)

Strange, you Googled waste management facility in search of recent developments in that industrial art and came upon this book. It's poetry. And you're reading it. Might it be that the range of poems in Waste Management Facility (WMF) lend voice to industry's working-class families who feel unheard or forgotten or quietly suffer?

So artfully staggered, so particular in their annotated moments, the poems ... declare 'it could only have been this way.' Scott Withiam finds surprise in the ordinary and, by finding it, attaches the extra-. His syntax creates a steady live vibration as he assesses the damages found in family and the scrabble of the working life.

-Sven Birkerts, author of The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing

... a sustained engagement ... that produces wonder after surreal wonder.... ("No words, just bubbles./ And what did that make me? A greasy dumpster raccoon/ feeling around for a clam underwater.") Quirky and quizzical, familiar and strange at once, Withiam's poems raise the kind of questions that refresh and restore the potential for meaning-making....

-Richard Hoffman, author of People Once Real

... a keen observer of ... what we like to call 'reality.' ... Withiam ... demands both outward skepticism and internal contemplation, and in the end sends the reader into the downward (or upward) spiral of the detritus of 'seeing-is-believing.'

-Gian Lombardo, Director, Quale Press and Editor-in-Chief, Solstice Literary Magazine

... what distinguishes Waste Management Facility is the poet's portrayal of working-class employment-the temp jobs, multiple shifts, and abusive bosses that are a fact of life for so many Americans. Read these poems ... because they are, simply, so damn good, their language and music rooted in what Whitman called the permanent flowing.

-Clare M. Rossini, author of Lingo

... For Scott Withiam, the past is the present, and it's peopled by those looking after their best interests, striving and stumbling.... His compassion is steady and so is his streetwise eye. His poems offer "delight / considering the strange gifts I'd bring, / if allowed to visit." I'd let him in if I were you.

-Ron Slate, author of Joy Ride