Odd Bloom Seen from Space
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
These poems speak an odd nostalgia for what turns on, in, and alongside the world. A tragedy of loss, a miracle of eroticism, or a comedy of road kill, Odd Bloom Seen from Space looks at the self amid the ashes of fleeting exultation and uncertainty. The speaker tells stories with wild candor on matters of heroic inadequacy while searching through his obsessive questions for greater meaning.
But it’s in the act of discovery, through the hero’s immediate ancestry that Welch’s debut collection confronts big questions about family, music, art, and memory. Like a contemporary Diogenes who pursues meaning one small gesture at a time, Welch comes to learn truth is a “brutal commerce,” beauty is “white legs / upon which she shed her childhood,” time is “Michael Jackson / hooting in the trees,” and “Love is gradual, a bottle / by sips, a bottle / poured onto the floor.” There is wisdom to be gained from these inventive pursuits, but in the end it’s not what is said, but how it’s said with terse rhetoric, deep imagery, and surprising humor that makes Odd Bloom Seen from Space such a gorgeous, original, and baffling collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"On what do we prop our lives and/ what if it can't hold," asks Welch in his tender, mysterious debut, a winner of the 2016 Iowa Poetry Prize. The props in question may be myth and memory, the book's base elements, which Welch uses to tell new stories about intimacy and identity. Masculinity is a particular site of revision: the book begins with the loss of virginity rendered in Herculean terms as a labor, even a slaughter, rather than a feat of bravura. Welch's poems are about "skinny boys/ without a sense of butchery" those for whom "honesty is a kind of/ solitude." Such distance leaves his characters at the fringes of history, struggling to understand their place in it: "I don't know/ how to collect each new// perspective," Welch writes in the title poem, which opens with an astronaut's description of the 9/11 attacks. But this remove also bestows vision, one that often makes the mundane life events the book recounts wonderfully unfamiliar. Welch sees snowballs as "brief comets/ smoldering// at my feet" and hears "Owls and their Michael Jackson/ hooting in the trees." His work is at once cubist and confessional, aching and wry. Welch's point-of-view, however eccentric, is an altogether welcome one.
