The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse (Steel Toe Books, 2013) starts with a bored and depressed telemarketer who, while just doing her job, starts getting poets on the phone, one of whom has been dead for more than 300 years. Her unexpected conversations with poets lead to her to confront the disaster of being nondescript. Meanwhile, the office supplies salesperson who lives in her building pines for the telemarketer, and Mr. Disagreeable, a disgraced surgeon-turned-pawnbroker, buys the pieces of the telemarketer’s disintegrating life. Finally, Granola Jones, who labors at a women’s shelter and lives in the telemarketer’s building, once dated the office supplies salesperson, is personal enemies with Mr. Disagreeable, and pushes peevishness and pettiness toward boisterous invective and assault. Through four sections, the sequence of poems tells their stories, from various perspectives, through confrontations at the buffet, oil changes and gifts made of paperclips, spectral visitations by deceased parents and one of Rilke’s angels, and open neighborly warfare. Cover photography by Paul Ruby.
Praise for Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse:
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky Fish, Oceanic, and World of Wonders.
“Gabriel Welsch’s remarkable third collection boisterously offers up a wonderfully imaginative romp through the wilds of pop-culture and various amusing suburban conflicts. These poems are at once hilarious and tender in their resolve to praise the very pulse of a busy life-even if we face the knowledge that ‘loss fires the blood/ loss starts the day, blood fired is the day.’ In poem after poem, Welsch displays a rare understanding of what it means to reward the reader by uncovering wild, brave, and beautiful truths about the human condition.”
“Welsch’s vision is spectacular, even when he’s looking at the apparently mundane. Where we might deign just a passing glance . . . Welsch looks carefully, then looks again. Welsch has taken the common details of our lives and ‘made them treasures,’ dialing up poetry in the most surprising moments.”
—Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood,
and History, Trophic Cascade, and Smith Blue.
“The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse reminds us that even minor, petty players can arrive at shattering truths. These poems experiment with form and voice. They present humor and pathos in equal measure . . . Most importantly, however, those moments of utter truth creep into the characters’ lives. ‘You just never know what to say to your own story,’ the telemarketer tells Granola Jones. She may be right, but fortunately these horsepersons have plenty to say about each other’s, and, perhaps about ours.”
—Abigail Cloud, in a review of the book in Mid-American Review
“Welsch’s collection will gratify a reader who enjoys a wide range of formal techniques and talents: it will tickle the reader with a keen sense of humor and it will move the reader with a penchant for empathy and insight: The Four Horsepersons of the Disappointing Apocalypse is a delightfully rich mixture of playfulness and profundity.”
—Anne Champion, in a review of the book in PANK
The Death of Flying Things (WordTech Editions, 2012) takes Pennsylvania as its primary subject. Within, readers can consider both the threat and fragility of flowers, what smoke means in November in Pennsylvania, the fire and temptation provided by seed catalogs arriving in the mail in January, why stacking firewood is romantic, what it feels like to ride the oldest roller coaster in the world, and the unlikely combination (perhaps) of walnuts and baseball. Cover image by Megan Reed, “four seasons: part four.”
Praise for The Death of Flying Things:
—Shara McCallum, author most recently of This Strange Land
“I first read Gabriel Welsch’s poems when I was a guest editor for West Branch and a handful of his poems came across the transom. They immediately distinguished themselves for their making new age-old themes and for their evocative language. Both of these are everywhere on display in this, his second full-length collection. The poems return again and again to the natural world and reveal how it instructs us in silence, patience, and humility—and how it gives us ways to approach life’s riddles, among them faith, love, and death. The particulars of the land the poet’s eye rests on are rendered in diction that is precise and as exquisite to the ear as it is to the mind. There are echoes of other great lyric poets throughout this collection—Stevens, Dickenson, even Frost—but the music Welsch makes is all his own. The Death of Flying Things is a song to the place we inhabit, physically and spiritually, which also comes to inhabit us, ‘this place…that reinvents darkness every night.’”
“Gabriel Welsch’s The Death of Flying Things isn’t comprised of elegies so much as love poems written to the long-suffering earth and for those who live on it, ‘the sky shattered under the burden of expectation,’ as one poem puts it. His poems comprise a complex vision, one up to the task of both recognizing the threat in how ‘what is left in the breeze / foretells ash,’ and still speaking, with assurance, of loving the magic of how ‘the hornets return / to the rusted lantern / bees to the blue mist to drowse /away the cool nights.’ These are poems enthralled with words and how they can love the world, from a poet who remembers ‘everything sacred comes from the body.’”
—George Looney, author most recently ofMonks Beginning to Waltz
An Eye Fluent in Gray (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010) is a chapbook of poems related to Pennsylvania. The cover photo was made by by Tim Auman.
Praise for An Eye Fluent in Gray:
“In poems set mostly in small, Pennsylvania towns, Gabe Welsch masterfully evokes a time ‘when the moon was still made mostly of myth.’ Attentive to the economics of daily life, the speaker describes a roller coaster operator: ‘a shambling fleshy boy doomed to a register/ life or to be shot dead in a desert.’ Deft imagery yields ‘a brocade of power lines’ in a poem honoring writer Malcolm Cowley. Welsch also understands negotiations among human beings and other creatures: the day before hunting season, ‘The deer smell / the smoke and know it’s time to climb / to higher spots.’ These original lyrics speak of rootedness and inevitable change with Welsch’s signature insight.”
—Robin Becker, author of Tiger Heron and Domain of Perfect Affection
“These are tough poems, all the more so because of their accessibility. The image I can’t get out of my head comes from ‘Route 422, Cambria County, Pennsylvania’: the state historical marker for the birthplace of another Pennsylvania poet, Malcolm Cowley, turned into a target for passing motorists: ‘you hear men / throw bottles at the sign, and the skitter of glass, / dainty as a chime.’ Yeah, that sounds about right. As the poem says a few stanzas earlier, ‘This place … reinvents darkness every night.’
—Dave Bonta, reviewing the book on the via Negative blog
“These kinetic, seasonal poems capture what it is like to ‘trick a body with mortal fear / and set it up so you can do it every day . . . ‘ Each page is drawn with clarity and elegance, but more than that. Welsch has done the near-impossible—negotiating the new complexities of snow in all its terrible and soft beauty, The music and emotional honesty of these poems sing breathlessly with the intelligence and warmth of spirit of the poet when you read this exacting and wise collection.”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Lucky Fish, Oceanic, and World of Wonders.
Dirt and All Its Dense Labor distills years of botanical and horticulturally-informed observation of central Pennsylvania, family and culture into a debut collection driven by the impulse to name images and appreciate their many resonances.
Praise for Dirt and All Its Dense Labor
—Richard Foerster, author of The Burning of Troy
“At the heart of Gabriel Welsch’s marvelous debut collection is earth’s urgent command—as Rilke puts it—for transformation. To the wondrous and fearsome cycles of bud, blossom, and decay, Welsch brings to bear not just his horticulturists’s eye for lavish beauty but also a scientist’s precision for uncovering what moves darkly beneath the surface of things. Reading these poems is to experience how language in the hands of a masterful poet can find root and tendril itself into art: ‘In this way, / syllables blossom, the names lose / their context of weeds, keep the color / slipped from the sun.’”
“Like Swedish botanist Linnaeus, who makes several appearances here, Gabriel Welsch observes and listens for ‘the minute stutter of biology,’ fashioning with a joyful lyricism ‘stories/that mortar the edges.’ Welsch attends equally to the demotic—’the coiled hose, //the mailbox flag, the forsythia clutched in English ivy’—and the speculative ‘high-ribbed leaves of heaven.’ Speaking as brother, citizen, father, and gardener, Welsch’s narrators deploy a range of prosodic techniques in original meditations on community, family, place. Superb homages to Bishop, O’Hara, and Merwin establish a lineage for this poet whose craft and erudition earn him a place among our most gifted newcomers.”
—Robin Becker, author of Tiger Heron and Domain of Perfect Affection
Groundscratching 