Description
Poetry. "Move over Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss, good old Anon, maybe even William Blake after how many pints of ale. Here's Cody Walker who declaims and bargains an 'icicle for a bicycle,' a 'vale of tears for ten good years.' Political, personal, this book is playful, pithy, outrageously out of style (omg-less rhyme galore!), this gathering a dark, endearing treasure made by accident and pure will. Beware: 'The LORD shall tickle thee with a feather duster, and boot thee with a tire iron, and goose thee with an actual goose.' Are these slippery inventions—'it all unravels'—really poetry? They come out of its ancient middle distance between wake and sleep and what the hell: they mean." —Marianne Boruch
"In Cody Walker's THE SELF-STYLED NO-CHILD, the poet-father sings to his new baby (read 'Cradle Song' or 'Small Suite' for perfect little servings of delight), but his childlike playfulness has an internal source, too. The light verses in Walker's new collection often have dark edges to them (see 'The Garden' or 'We Hated Our Lives'), and his social and political satires are unflinching. Still, this word-wizard with a genius for rhyme reminds us of how irrepressibly joy remains." —Mary Jo Salter
Author Bio
Cody Walker was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1967. He holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin, an MFA from the University of Arkansas, and a PhD from the University of Washington. He received the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from Shenandoah in 2003 and a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Washington in 2005. A longtime writer-in-residence in Seattle Arts & Lectures' Writers in the Schools program, he was elected Seattle Poet Populist in 2007. As well as his Waywiser poetry collections, Walker is the co-editor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Parnassus, Slate, Poetry Northwest, The Hecht Prize Anthology, and Best American Poetry (2007 and 2015); and his essays have appeared online in The New Yorker and The Kenyon Review. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he teaches English at the University of Michigan.
Author City: ANN ARBOR, MI USA