Blowdown by Jessica L. Walsh coming soon!
Book description
In an effort to understand how people grow from the soil of their family's past--and particularly, how I got to be who I am as a person and poet--Blowdown takes on the work of archaeology. Historical evidence, most newly found during the process of writing the book, uncovers so little of the truth; instead, what I find remains fully fragmented, like pieces of bone unearthed after centuries. These poems attempt to piece those fragments into story, to build narrative in the absence of one.
Praise for Blowdown
William Faulkner warned in Requiem for a Nun that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Blowdown, Jessica L. Walsh’s newest poetry collection, vibrates with a world where this truth breathes, stalks, and unsettles across generations. Walsh time-shifts through a sepia-soaked landscape of ancestral sins and injustices done in our name before we’re named, with brief flashes of inherited heroism piercing the haze. Here, the unconscious past becomes our impossible charge: to heal what can’t be erased, to contend with the blood and bones that shape our DNA and poison our air, even as we sense the village closing in. The burning question, how to become ourselves amid this crushing inheritance, hovers over every page.
Walsh’s poems move through danger, reckoning, and revelation, whispering warnings and confessions: “harmless, yes, / the way men are / when they have all they want / and no one to answer to.” The choice to conceal past crimes or expose them creates an unending cycle of ethical crises, in which progress comes only in fitful bursts. How do we tell these truths, and what do we do with them once we have? This contradiction, Walsh reminds us, “is a warning against story, / against exactly what you are trying to do.” For these poems bear both the weight of unearthed histories and the gravity of turning away: “I dug up this chalky dirt / and now it’s mine to carry. // Nothing shakes my dreams / free of bones.” Yet we also remember the body’s strategies for survival: “Because of him, I know at least two ways / to leave every room I enter, // and I carry at least two ways / to take a man down.” Continuity and collapse compete at every step of our lives, and the lives we’ll leave behind.
In poems where “life’s enemy territory,” Walsh renders a world where punishment, penance, and inheritance bleed into one another: “I don’t know what punishment is now—/ if penance is another day or its absence.” Besieged by the past, we must confront, carry, and ultimately transform its weight into something fertile. Fierce and elegiac, Blowdown delivers an unforgettable excavation of what it means to inherit both violence and resilience, and to walk forward knowing the past walks with us.
—Elizabeth Strauss Friedman, author of The Lost Positive and The Eggshell Skull Rule
Adrienne Rich wrote, “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.” Jessica L. Walsh is a thinking woman and her poems delve into the harsh histories of family, friends, and country. With her singular, laser-focused attention and her powerful language she brings unbearable past truths to light, creating art that both breaks and heals us. “Because of him, I know at least two ways/to leave every room I enter,// and carry at least two ways/to take a man down.// He was hurt as a boy./I want the truth to mean more than it does.// God forgive me: I don’t forgive him at all.” This is a poet at the peak of her powers—a clairvoyant voice for our dark times. Walsh understands that to name a demon, dilutes its power to harm. With her short lined lyrics and fast-paced narratives, I find myself hanging on every word each time I read this book. One of the titles in this collection, “I keep trying to tell you” is short-hand for entire project. Walsh’s finely-crafted fierce poems bear witness and wrestle into language the often unsayable horrors, big and small, that humans inflict on each other. There is so much to admire in these poems not least of which is the truth-telling about the patriarchy that Walsh treats with the precision of an archeologist. As Rich wrote,
“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.” We need more poets with the bold vision of Jessica L. Walsh. Blowdown is an important book for our tumultuous times.
—Jennifer Franklin, A Fire in Her Brain (Princeton University, 2026)
Jessica Walsh's previous collection, Book of Gods and Grudges, is the poetry book I’ve recommended most over the last few years. Now with Blowdown, Walsh handles words like knives that peel back the bark from her family tree: "I write / from what we tried to hide," one poem declares. While Walsh writes through centuries of ancestors, she never spares her many-layered self from scrutiny and revelation: "What I’m saying is / there are ways for me to feel good / or ways to see the truth, / not both." I couldn't put this book down, and I can't wait to share it!
—Katie Manning, author of Hereverent and Tasty Other
Credit: Feel This Moment Photography
Jessica L. Walsh is the author of three previous collections: Book of Gods and Grudges, The List of Last Tries and How to Break My Neck. Her work has appeared on the Best American Poetry Blog and journals like RHINO, Painted Bride Quarterly, Whale Road Review, Crab Creek Review, and many more. Originally from Ludington, Michigan, she currently lives outside of Chicago and teaches at a community college. For more information, see jessicalwalsh.com.