Books published by Accents Publishing

"We all wear masks. There are people with whom we can take our masks off and speak from the heart. Professor Walker is an expert in masks, or personas. And he well knows that sometimes masks let us speak deep truths about the world. He also knows masks sometimes protect us, sometimes keep us from ourselves, and sometimes cause us pain. Paul Dunbar, in "We Wear the Mask," asks of the world and of poetry, "Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?" Yet, it seems that now, as then, the world pays too little attention to the tears and sighs about which Dunbar sings. We are so grateful that Walker has taken the time to sit with death and pain and heartbreak, to sit and tune his voice to sing these elegies, so that we can gather around him to sing through our tears with head held high. " -Jeremy Paden

"The poems in this rich collection are both spare and candid, chronicling the demise of a marriage, even as it nearly coincides with a father's blooming love for his young daughter. One love is lost, but a wholly different love arrives. At times the contrast is inexplicable and the speaking voice in these poems doesn't quite know to whom the poems should be addressed- the ex-wife, the young daughter, himself, the ether. That is a perspective I find so arresting in this book, a crossroads of grief that has no bottom and love that has no end, weighted with the plain responsibility of somehow going forward"--