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Prime Time
“This book is a real pleasure, full of engaging poems on a wide variety of subjects, drawing on the poet’s wide travels, life experience, and keen insight. There are thumbnail biographies containing little-known historical facts (“Diogenes” and “Tom Paine’s Bones”), bemused social commentaries (“Men’s Book Club”), interesting nature poems (“Killer Whales Attack Yachts Off Gibraltar”), and philological gems (“Lear on the Heath”). All poems use natural words in natural order, have memorable diction and imagery, and are rewarding on first reading.” — David Stephenson, author of Secret Dance
Alms for Oblivion
“The poems in Alms for Oblivion have a lapidary precision in their intelligence and power of observation. William Heath’s lines lift me out of my own self-absorption and into a larger world. He has an empathetic awareness of what it means to be human. Reading this marvelous collection reminds me of why I came to poetry in the first place.” — George Bilgere, author of Cheap Motels of My Youth
Inventing the Americas
“For William Heath the islands and continents of what the Europeans were pleased to call the New World were not so much “discovered” by Christopher Colón as invented. “The world in his head,” as Heath writes of Colón, “is not the one under his feet.” Off the coast of Venezuela Colón sees the Orinoco splitting into four branches like the rivers of the Terrestrial Paradise and writes to Queen Isabella “I have just found the Garden of Eden.” It is a paradise laid open to despoliation and rape. Heath tells the story of the misapprehensions, misnamings and crimes of Colón and his companions in their conquest of this immense land with a poet’s eye, finding just the right moment, the right detail to distil this long tale of exploitation, enslavement and death in thirteen brief poems.” — Zeese Papanikolas, author of Savages
Going Places
“William Heath is a master at describing his journeys to fascinating, exotic, and challenging places in the world, where people, history, art, and natural beauty inspire his poetry. He weaves unforgettable poems with humor, skill, intelligence, and compassion, for he is a poet who loves the world and celebrates it, while accepting that its beauty is often fragile, tainted by human greed and imperfection. “Travel is the saddest/ pleasure in the world…” Heath writes, thus capturing the traveler’s pleasure of discovery and the pain caused by witnessing the suffering of others, the ravages of war, oppression, and ignorance. Few poets understand the fragility of our world as deeply as Heath does. “Our hold on this world,/” he states, “is a thin thread.” We have much to learn from him and from his poetry.” —Esperanza Hope Snyder, author of Esperanza and Hope
Steel Valley Elegy
Steel Valley Elegy includes poems from Night Moves in Ohio as well as many more: some depict the civil rights movement in the Deep South and civil disturbances in northern cities. Others present Heath’s wry and ironic look at life in these United States, and a final sequence evokes the world of nature while raising philosophical questions. Heath maintains that poetry is written in musical lines about things that matter. His love of language, wide range of interests, and uncanny eye for telling details are always on display. A meditative yet humorous sensibility, an unflinching appetite for reality, memorable eloquence—Steel Valley Elegy displays the distinctive skills of an accomplished poet.
Leaving Seville
“The deft imagery of Leaving Seville lingers in our minds. . . Heath is a poet for those of us who have grown tired of the showy, poetic language and self-centered perspectives so familiar today. He is more modest, more self-deprecating, a poet whose insights give us a refreshing hint at a worldly, intelligent persona.” —David Salner, author of The Stillness of Certain Valleys
Night Moves in Ohio
“The rousing first poem in William Heath’s bildungsroman in poetry dealing with childhood and youth in steel country Ohio seems to channel Joe Magarac, Carl Sandburg, and James Wright, but the voice is intimately his own. These poetic narratives are by turns poignant, funny and starkly realistic. They are the human stories of the mid-twentieth century industrial mid-west, one hundred years after Ohio was the Old Northwest frontier, and the honest sentiments in these poems remind us how a centrality of setting, as much time as place, form our experiences into themes. Every poem is engrossing, teeming with fascinating storyline detail and imagery.” —William Hathaway, author of Dawn Chorus, New and Selected Poems
Conversations with Robert Stone
Stone’s reputation rests on his mastery of the craft of fiction. These interviews are replete with insights about the creative process as he responds with disarming honesty to probing questions about his major works. Stone also has fascinating things to say about his remarkable life—a schizophrenic mother, a stint in the navy, his involvement with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, and his presence at the creation of the counterculture. From the publication of A Hall of Mirrors until his death in 2015, Stone was a major figure in American literature
William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest
Stone’s reputation rests on his mastery of the craft of fiction. These interviews are replete with insights about the creative process as he responds with disarming honesty to probing questions about his major works. Stone also has fascinating things to say about his remarkable life—a schizophrenic mother, a stint in the navy, his involvement with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, and his presence at the creation of the counterculture. From the publication of A Hall of Mirrors until his death in 2015, Stone was a major figure in American literature
The Children Bob Moses Led
“Mention Freedom Summer these days and you’re likely to get a blank stare. Heath’s book should help remedy that. Tom Morton himself is an engaging, intelligent character, as are those with whom he spends this hot, often frightening time: ‘Feelgood,’ the young black man who is his boss; Esther, with whom Tom lusts after but who is in love with Feelgood; and Lenny, the friend whose sarcasm is a foil for their sometimes self-righteous assertions. The author clearly knows his subject and can evoke a scene, and one is drawn into the action and compelled by the events themselves.” —The Washington Post
Devil Dancer
“With prose that is both muscular and lyrical, William Heath takes us on a journey through the swanky horse farms and seed back streets of Lexington, Kentucky in the early 70s in pursuit of the killer of a majestic thoroughbred. Mingling wry humor and tough guy dialogue that Elmore Leonard would be proud of, Devil Dancer is brimming over with haunting characters who are never exactly who they first appear. This is a first-rate novel of suspense that also accomplishes all the things we expect from our best works of literature.” —James W. Hall, author of The Hit List and Mean High Tide
Blacksnake’s Path: The True Adventures of William Wells
“Blacksnake’s Path: The True Adventures of William Wells, is one of the best books, perhaps the best book that describes the earliest, wild and bloody days of the American Midwest. William Heath portrays this area superbly from the point of view of the Indians as well as of the whites through telling the life of William Wells. The amazing Wells lived on both sides of the conflict from the first American settlement of Kentucky in the 1770s through the Fort Dearborn Massacre in Chicago in 1812.” —Jerry Crimmins, author of Fort Dearborn (Northwestern University Press)
The Walking Man
“William Heath is in my opinion one of the most brilliantly accomplished and gifted young poets to appear in the United States in quite some time. I am especially moved by the delicacy and precision of the language, which indicates a distinguished intelligence, and by the purity and depth of feeling in all of his poems.” —James Wright