What a way to initiate the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, a series honoring one of our best American poets, by introducing an important new talent, Michael Walsh, a poet who concentrates on meaningful particulars and who doesn't try to dazzle us with poetic footwork. These are poems about work and farm life, the minutes and days and years, the harsh numbers mounting - about strong, feeling people as they sense their way of life slipping away, even as they struggle to maintain themselves and find their own identity. Walsh has a fine eye, authority with our precious words, and a deft hand with the music of our language. - Paul Zimmer, author of Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: ""Walsh's poems in this beautiful book present us with particularized erotics of nature, in which the speaker feels an electricity running through all living things. The poems celebrate that force in a hushed, almost breathless voice that nevertheless is as tough as the objects that it locates and names. Who remembers nature without romantic distortion? Well, Walsh does, on this farm, with these people and animals, and their work, and their loves, in abundance."" - Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love ""Walsh has trained his keen eye on the hardscrabble family farm of the Midwest to give us a powerful American elegy.... These fierce lyrics burn away the fat of nostalgia and evoke a lost way of life that was beloved but also bruising. The poems form an enthralling plot, moving deftly from a boyhood on the farm to the urban life of adulthood with its city gardens, love, passion, and memory. The result is a book that establishes both a world and a voice. A magnificent debut."" - Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist's Daughter