Overview

A Season is a visionary meditation born out of a spiritual crisis. As the poems attempt to remake a life within the ghostly limbo into which they’ve fallen—between self and world, sound and echo, the uncanny and the sublime—they work to reweave an intimacy between the past and the present, the “self” and its others, and between the world that remains and a world that’s been irrevocably lost. Full of strange ecstasies and waking dreams, A Season is a self-portrait as blank space, a self-portrait as continual becoming—“a house of mirrors in which every face is perpetually on its way.""

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Reviews

A mesmerizing, slow burn of a book, A Season is deeply inquisitive and mercurial at once. In whirling, diaristic movement sheared by sand and 'semi-snow,' by a face 'at the speed of thought,' its warped and wefted sequences scrutinize foreignness, the human body, the 'apparitional surge' of self and other. The architecture here is beautifully tensioned, built on rollers for allowing flux under panicky conditions, whether social or metaphysical, telluric or psychosomatic. Ever approaching a volatile edge, Walsh’s lyric nightwalking keeps us oneirically awake, unwilling to break with 'a myriad world’s arrangement risk and sun.' -- Andrew Zawacki * author of These Late Eclipses and Unsun: f/11 * With precision and quiet plenitude, Michael Joseph Walsh stages and disintegrates decadent and lyrical modes, now languorous, now in ‘sudden bloom.’ A Season elaborates a microclimate of self-alienation which inverts to its most surprising hypocrite double: sympathy. Against all expectations, the drunken boat finds its needle, and ‘with astonishment, propels itself along,’ ‘into the heart like a cool green sea.’ -- Joyelle McSweeney * author of Death Styles * Maybe, I think to myself, Michael Joseph Walsh is amnesia’s Proust. In his exhilarating second book, a person is born seemingly right into adulthood, drenched in experience and yet somehow innocent—unknown to himself but known to the world that forms him the way ‘vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf.’ The bracing syntax and haptic precisions of this lyrist feel corporeally intimate, earthbound and giddy, ever on the exuberant cusp of—dare one say it?—beauty, of ‘autonomy, [. . .] an enormous ray / Of sunlight / Which is the buzz of coming back online.’ -- Aditi Machado * author of Material Witness * A Season is unlike anything I have ever read before. Musical, imaginative, and utterly surprising, Walsh’s poems unfurl like a study in estrangement or the map of a consciousness within a dream: 'song, pantomime, song, slow fire.' This book lets us touch the pain and ecstasy we might find while parsing a strange world, the wonder we might feel bringing language to a place where we are not at home. -- Jessica Tanck * author of Winter Here *

I found A Season to be a mesmerizing, slow burn of a book, intensely inquisitive and mercurial at once. Its two discrete long poems scrutinize foreignness, the body, and the earth these phenomena happen on, which kept me in swirling movement. Its facility and clear felicity with language are exhilarating, but with an edge. I was oneirically awake from start to finish. The architecture of the whole is beautifully tensioned, as well, though built on rollers for allowing flux under dangerous conditions, whether social, telluric, or metaphysical.--Andrew Zawacki ""Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of Georgia""

A Season is a mesmerizing, slow burn of a book, intensely inquisitive and mercurial at once. Its two discrete long poems scrutinize foreignness, the body, and the earth these phenomena happen on, which kept me in swirling movement. Its facility and clear felicity with language are exhilarating, but with an edge. I was oneirically awake from start to finish. The architecture of the whole is beautifully tensioned, as well, though built on rollers for allowing flux under dangerous conditions, whether social, telluric, or metaphysical. -- Andrew Zawacki * Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of Georgia * With precision and quiet plenitude, Michael Joseph Walsh stages and disintegrates decadent and lyrical modes, now languorous, now in 'sudden bloom.' A Season elaborates a micro-climate of self-alienation which inverts to its most surprising hypocrite double: sympathy. Against all expectations, the drunken boat finds its needle, and 'with astonishment, propels itself along,' 'into the heart like a cool green sea.' -- Joyelle McSweeney * author of Death Styles * Maybe, I think to myself, Michael Joseph Walsh is amnesia’s Proust. In his exhilarating second book, a person is born seemingly right into adulthood, drenched in experience and yet somehow innocent—unknown to himself but known to the world that forms him the way 'vegetable juices swell gradually into the perfect leaf.' The bracing syntax and haptic precisions of this lyrist feel corporeally intimate, earthbound and giddy, ever on the exuberant cusp of—dare one say it?—beauty, of 'autonomy, […] an enormous ray / Of sunlight / Which is the buzz of coming back online.' -- Aditi Machado * author of Material Witness * A Season is unlike anything I have ever read before. Musical, imaginative, and utterly surprising, Walsh’s poems unfurl like a study in estrangement or the map of a consciousness within a dream: 'song, pantomime, song, slow fire.' This book lets us touch the pain and ecstasy we might find while parsing a strange world, the wonder we might feel bringing language to a place where we are not at home. -- Jessica Tanck * author of Winter Here *

Author Information

MICHAEL JOSEPH WALSH is the author of Innocence, which was selected by Shane McCrae as the winner of the 2021 Lighthouse Poetry Series. He is the editor of APARTMENT Poetry, and his poems, translations, and criticism have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Fence, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He lives in Philadelphia.

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