August, our longest month…the long hot summer…our hardest season…many folks will be reading this edition from the cool realms of their mountain getaways…nice.
For those of us hangin’ in Rocky Point let’s see what we can find to chill with in our column today.
I’d like to present Michael Walsh the Midwestern farm lad who knows about long hot summers and how to endure them. He won the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize for this his first collection The Dirt Riddles, published in 2012.
Read about the universality of all of us, no matter where we grew up in this:
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Weekly Horoscope
Grandma spread the local paper
across her vinyl tablecloth
the way a psychic would prepare
her worn stack of cards.
Then she flipped to the obituaries,
passed the magnifying glass
back and forth over the black facts
in search of that wonderful day
when she’d read her name, and know.
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Michael came to this first publication as most new poets must with successful entries in many venues from Alaska Quarterly Review to Southern Poetry Review.
In a review of The Dirt Riddles in basalt by James Crews, he states: “Walsh has left us with this testament of a life spent tending the land, and without a tinge of pretense or resentment. It’s been a few years since the publication of The Dirt Riddles, but I for one hope that Walsh is hard at work on his second book.”
Michael Walsh currently is a course coordinator in the English Department at the University of Minnesota.
Well worth a second look indeed. Please join us in our on-line writing group as we invest in our literary selves at m.diane.writeon@gmail.com
