Overview

At once deeply personal and infused with a profound respect for its literary predecessors, The Book of Echoes resonates with the speaker's journey through Tourette's syndrome. This exploration of motor tics, echolalia, and phantom speech gradually unfolds into a joyous and surreal celebration of Jack Spicer's insight that ""Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can."" Welch's The Book of Echoes delights in illuminating the intimate spaces of connection that poetry provides.

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9781956907230

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Reviews

The Book of Echoes is a tour de force of the internal voice, one that's sent out into the world and comes back in myriad waves, demonstrating the complicated, beautiful, and varied nature of the human mind. Taking on the voice of Robert Creeley, David Gregory Welch asks: ""these / days what isn't / a religion?"" and these poems answer that question time and time again: what we might seek from the outside world can also be found within the striations of the self, ""a heart / full of wet sand // beating beside the ocean.-Adam Clay, author of Circle BackThe Book of Echoes is a song not easily sung. ""I'm alive and live in my failure to live,"" David Gregory Welch writes, the imperative clanging against his deft and lyrical restraint. Through captivating accounts of Tourette syndrome, Welch's language mirrors repeated movements and sounds, embodying Auden's vision of poetry as ""a way of happening, a mouth."" ""Look,"" he writes, ""I cannot move the way you hope I do, a blanket / in the breeze of its own control"". David Gregory Welch's poems celebrate and transform the body's limits in this intoxicating, unforgettable collection.-Jenny Molberg, The Court of No RecordEchoes are born of depth and dimension, in cavernous, resonant, and hard spaces. The Book of Echoes makes that kind of space: deep and expansive, rich and complex. Within it, David Gregory Welch's surreal poems ricochet and careen. They startle and rivet. Biting in its politics, singular in its observations, heartfelt in its confessions, his is a voice that resonates and lingers so that long after the reading is done, the poems remain and remain and remain.-Jaswinder Bolina, English as a Second Language

Author Information

David Gregory Welch is the author of EVERYONE WHO IS DEAD (Spork Press, 2018) and a chapbook, IT IS SUCH A GOOD THING TO BE IN LOVE WITH YOU (The Laurel Review/Midwest Chapbook Series, 2015). He is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Welch lives in Chicago and teaches occasionally at DePaul University and StoryStudio Chicago.

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