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The Sinks
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by Ryan Walsh (2010)
24 pages
Cost: $8.00
S&H: $3.50
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About the book:
2010
Winner in the Mississippi
Valley Chapbook Contest
Reviews:
"A prayer for transformation for recognition
that even humans, those creatures of
'marbled meat/ and water,' are part of the
land: we are crops, 'lithe, bright grasses."
-Jennifer Perrine
"In language rich and sinewy, with a terse
energy and an evocative music, Ryan Walsh
establishes his mastery as a poet of place.
Like Richard Hugo, James Wright, Philip
Levine, or Seamus Heaney before him, he
embraces a love of the elemental, of earth
and weather and landscape, of rural people
and working-class life. Always accessible,
bristling with sensual clarity, his poems
nevertheless retain a sense of mystery and
enigma that teases the reader into thought.
As a line from Walsh's wonderfully
celebratory poem "In the Frame of Innings,
Pendleton County, W. Va." suggests, "What
else to do but tip my hat / and marvel?"
-Ronald Wallace
"For Ryan Walsh, a pursuit of the Divine
isn't possible without investigating the
hard truths of landscape and the limitations
of the body. Line by line, the music in The
Sinks is arresting. The beauty here is
boiled down to an essential and distinctly
American voice. These poems hover in space
between the pastoral and elegy. As if in a
wind stripped field, the reader is invited
to stand shoulder to shoulder with these
speakers, searching for a vocabulary to
ground the grandeur of a Midwestern
horizon."
-Amaud Jamaul Johnson 
"Driven with a love of baseball and youth,
finding one's identity in the landscape, the
roads, the months,
and the mystery of how it is all kept
together, the mystery of where we are from
that defines us, and
trying to see where one belongs."
-Sheri Grutz
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