By Will Wells
“These are the poems of a poet who takes his obligations seriously—obligations to his world, his family, his intellectual heritage: ‘The longing / in belongings lines up in rows of books, / a thousand titles of how owned I am.’ These highly musical poems, which include a generous helping of superbly crafted sonnets, are beautifully written, smart, and moving—rich in all the rewards poetry offers.”
Andrew Hudgins
To take the mess of life and make meaning from it is what all poets seek to do. For Will Wells, recipient of the thirteenth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, this includes reaching across centuries and continents, into the minds and hearts of disparate individuals—Albert Einstein, Andrea Yates, the traveler from Porlock, Dante, or Holocaust survivors, including his own grandmother—to extract the personal value embedded there for him.
By turns funny, shocking, gentle, and musing, the poems of Unsettled Accounts reflect Will Wells’s constant attention to his environment and to his past—and to our environment and our past—and his persistent effort to keep them real and whole by turning them into art.
Ping-Pong with the Nazis
Bored couriers have kicked off boots and set
their pipes aside, a Dutch interior.
The slapped ball clacks over the table
like a telegraphic code, then trickles
like faint hope across the marble floor.
How quickly he bends to retrieve it
and puts it back in play, the Jewish boy
living with false papers in a villa
owned by his mother’s Gentile friends, and now
commandeered by retreating Germans
as divisional headquarters. The young
blond soldiers, deferential to a social
better, muss his blond locks like the kid
brothers back in the fatherland, like big
brothers steeped in genial menace.
He begs another game, so they relent.
As the ball resumes its chatter across
the no-man’s-land strung with a net,
he calculates the risk that each shot brings.
And so do they. He holds his pee and serves.
Will Wells has published poems and literary translations widely in the United States and the United Kingdom. His first book of poetry, Conversing with the Light, won the 1987 Anhinga Award. He is a professor of English/Humanities at Rhodes State College, Lima, Ohio. More info →
Retail price:
$17.95 ·
Save 20% ($14.36)
Retail price:
$29.95 ·
Save 20% ($23.96)
US and Canada only
Availability and price vary according to vendor.
Share 
To request instructor exam/desk copies, email Jeff Kallet at kallet@ohio.edu.
To request media review copies, email Laura Andre at andrel@ohio.edu.
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Paperback
978-0-8214-1904-5
Retail price: $17.95,
S.
Release date: January 2010
80 pages
·
5½ × 8½ in.
Rights: World
Hardcover
978-0-8214-1903-8
Retail price: $29.95,
S.
Release date: January 2010
80 pages
·
5½ × 8½ in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-8214-4306-4
Release date: January 2010
80 pages
Rights: World
Solving for X
Poems
By Robert B. Shaw
In Solving for X, his award-winning collection of new poems, Robert B. Shaw probes the familiar and encounters the unexpected; in the apparently random he discerns a hidden order. Throughout, Shaw ponders the human frailties and strengths that continue to characterize us, with glances at the stresses of these millennial times that now test our mettle and jar our complacency. Often touched with humor, his perceptions are grounded in devoted observation of the changing world.As
Infinite Morning
Poems
By Meredith Carson
About the author of this award-winning collection, final judge Miller Williams commented:“Meredith Carson writes poems so well-controlled in tone that the language of conversation takes on an elegance rarely found in contemporary poetry, but emphatically contemporary.”In this, her first collection of poetry, Meredith Carson combines form and feeling, human nature and animal instinct, a scientist’s eye and a poet’s heart to create poetry of detail and delight.From
Nostos
By V. Penelope Pelizzon
In choosing the winning manuscript for the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, judge Andrew Hudgins remarked: “With immense poetic verve, Pelizzon finds flamboyance in places where it has been forgotten and brings it back to vivid life—and she sees it for what it is. Her vision is then both passionate and dispassionate at the same time, a maturity of perspective that is just one of the many accomplishments of this superb first book.”In
Photographing Eden
Poems
By Jason Gray
Photographing Eden presents the first full-length collection of poems by a major new talent. The work meditates on several ideas, the crux of which is Eden: spirituality, environmentalism, and the relationships between men and women. Observing, often through the lens of a camera, our state in the world, the poems try to focus sharply on what often seems a blur.
