Books by Joe Weil

The Backwards Year collects poems written between June 2018 back to June 2017, more or less, in reverse order and juxtaposes the poet's childhood with love poems for his own neural atypical children, Clare and Gabriel. The book returns to childhood in some of its rhyming poems, but also by exploring the dark spaces where childhood is a kind of fevered dream that keeps informing and shaping the present. This is the most reflective and meditative book Weil has written yet.

A Night in Duluth is an uncertain and often tongue-in-cheek dream in which the voice of the poet makes due, speaks to what is both lost and found-to the confusion of being in an American oligarchy where poverty is growing as fast as private prisons and every bowl of soup is likely to contain a fly. Weil imagines this Duluth as a sort of dark night of the soul in which hope and cynicism can be erased as easily as grease paint from the face of a performer. There are moments of tenderness and respite, but the surreal presence of the dead informs almost all the poems and the idea of pratfall, and dead pan, the acts of making due in a diminished life and surviving by a kind of comic-tragic shtick is all pervasive. Weil considers this his most difficult and honest book. It is a puppet theater in which most of the audience is comprised of ghosts

The Plumber's Apprentice differs from Weil's previous work in that it charts the nature of suffering beyond the limits of his working class "Elizabeth" and focuses more deeply on two aspects of his life: his Irish Catholic sense of communion, with the living and the dead (all who have gone forth marked with the sign of faith), and the essential solitude of being a single, short, bald man who has no offspring, no legacy, no beloved, and is falling, however slowly, to his death. Perhaps the question Weil asks most frequently is: given the inevitable co-ordinates of ongoing failure, how does a poet give the middle finger to grade z forms of Emersonian positivism and have some fun in this vale of tears? In sum: if love is impossible, and life severely limited, and loneliness is devouring the furniture, where's the closest bar, and do they have a good jukebox? For brief moments Weil succeeds in making failure, death and love his drinking buddies. In the poet's messed up ontology, they make for a lively and comical crew.