Wednesday After Lunch

Will Walker has written a collection of poems so intelligent and clear that reading them I wake up-and find myself alive in the world. This is what art can do-and every time it happens it's a miracle. Here is a miraculous book-awake to what the Buddhists call the "full catastrophe" of living right now. If you want to feel yourself alive and in great company, buy this book and read it, and then pass it on. -Marie Howe, author of The Kingdom of Ordinary Time T here is a calm meditative grace to the poems in Will Walker's Wednesday After Lunch. His is a narrative "in the American grain," to use William Carlos Williams' phrase. While some are quiet lyric poems of love of landscape and streetscape and quite human dogs, and some of a sweet domestic love, even asleep, a man and his wife "on your own side/of the bed/ split neatly into neighboring countries," Walker's work has that very American room for Khrushchev at the UN pounding his shoe, and rhinestones, and Monopoly, and Jack Ruby, and Marilyn Monroe. In a tour de force of a poem, he writes of a dream of a bonfire, a barbecue on the flats in Provincetown, everyone from his Edenic past reunited, and "even the ocean loves to gather by fire." These are poems to warm yourself by. -Gail Mazur, author of Zeppo's First Wife I W f you want a batch of poems that are consistently good, if you consistently enjoy the poems of, say, Billy Collins or William Stafford or Sharon Olds, and if you were inclined to take any one of them with you to a desert island, mountain retreat, or simply to your own home, you may find yourself content in the company of Will Walker's poems. All things being relative in poetry, these poems tend toward the precise and the astounding; these are most often "stories" told with attention to where any parts of the story are likely to lead the reader, digression to detour and closer inspection to wider perspective: like the diagram of the city containing the aroma and curiosity of time before you-past, future, present! The subjects journey, Italo Calvino-like, from what summons to what will not go away. In the space of these poems, there's a lot that won't go away and only some things, ephemeral by day, that are preserved as in a ghost-town you are happy to re-visit because when you do you, like the poet, will become closer to your nature. -Peter Money, editor and publisher of Harbor Mountain Press W ill Walker's poems are vivid, poignant, often funny, and always big-hearted. He writes with a keen eye, a generous heart, and an expansive spirit, both embracing the everyday and transcending it. His poems always make me see with new eyes. They are love poems to the world. -Thea Sullivan, poet and teacher of The Intuitive Voice