A Season: Poems [Paperback]

MICHAEL JOSEPH WALSH is the author of Innocence, which was selected by Shane McCrae as the winner of the 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series. He is the editor of APARTMENT Poetry, and his poems, translations, and criticism have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Fence, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.A Season is a visionary meditation born out of a spiritual crisis. As the poems attempt to remake a life within the ghostly limbo into which they’ve fallen—between self and world, sound and echo, the uncanny and the sublime—they work to reweave an intimacy between the past and the present, the self and its others, and between the world that remains and a world that’s been irrevocably lost. Full of strange ecstasies and waking dreams, A Season is a self-portrait as blank space, a self-portrait as continual becoming—a house of mirrors in which every face is perpetually on its way."A collection of ecstatic, uncanny meditations on intimacy and distance, infinity and void, and self and worldWith precision and quiet plenitude, Michael Joseph Walsh stages and disintegrates decadent and lyrical modes, now languorous, now in ‘sudden bloom.’ A Season elaborates a microclimate of self-alienation which inverts to its most surprising hypocrite double: sympathy. Against all expectations, the drunken boat finds its needle, and ‘with astonishment, propels itself along,’ ‘into the heart like a cool green sea.’Maybe, I think to myself, Michael Joseph Walsh is amnesia’s Proust. In his exhilarating second book, a person is born seemingly right into adulthood, drenched in experience and yet somehow innocent—unknown to himself but known to the world that forms hil³”