Books published by The Waywiser Press

My German Dictionary, which won the fourteenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, is a guide to an idiosyncratic interior country, a map of the experience of absorbing and being absorbed by Central European language, culture, aesthetics, and history. It is a catalogue of small beloved things inflected by massive horrors. The poems are home to and haunted by Franz Marc¿s horses, ETA Hoffmann¿s tales, the Great War, Bertolt Brecht, Rosa Luxemburg, enchanted bears, Weimar Berlin, and vanished relatives, along with an entire alphabet of mishearings, mnemonics, and valentines for the German language. These are the poems of an historian wrestling with mastery of the unmasterable, the histories in miniature of a poet.

"e;Mary Elizabeth Pope's collection of short stories, Divining Venus, is a page turner. One wonderful story after another unfolds in this perceptive, engaging collection of such observant tales that it feels as if Ms. Pope has followed you around your whole life and figured out everything about you: your puzzling missteps in high school, your first and often mistaken love, your missed opportunities and chance encounters, your youthful mistakes and stunning betrayals, everything secret and true that has haunted you and made you who you are. Assured and steady, Ms. Pope's writing carries you deeper into yourself, where you will be happy to discover that you are not alone."e; - Robin Oliveira (author of My Name is Mary Sutter and I Always Loved You)

Clive Watkins's powerful second collection is by turns sensuous, sombre, lyrical and discursive. Already the Flames explores the position of those complicit in suffering or compelled to observe it in a world that appears ruled by malice or chance. The early sections are shadowed by the figure of Apollyon, the demon who attacks Bunyan's pilgrim. Hauntings, entrapment and escape are themes that weave in and out. The book moves towards an ambiguous release in the realm of the personal. The collection is remarkable for its formal range: poems, and sequences of poems, in free verse, in prose and in rhymed and unrhymed metres of various kinds. There are also several idiosyncratic and fluent translations. In Already the Flames Clive Watkins fulfils the expectations created by his first Waywiser book, Jigsaw, of 2003.

The Self-Styled No-Child, Cody Walker's second book of poems, offers an unlikely array of characters: Edward Lear, Mitt Romney, Amy Clampitt, and Andy Kaufman share the stage.Walker himself is ever-present, with his shrugs, his heartbreak, his "way-out rhymes" "I'd like to write some lines about the snow, / but--I dunno, / the snow seems so / fleeting: / a flock of gulls, late for a meeting." Full of comic interruptions and grave forecasts, these poems surprise, delight, and terrify.