Atria : Poems

“Refusing parallel movement, the hands/ Those empty frames. Imagine holding/ a Memory—or was it a photograph” In this rich, prismatic collection, D.S. Waldman guides readers through the halls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, into encounters with Georges Braque and Frida Kahlo, and back through the landscapes of coastal California and his own rural Kentucky childhood. Along the way, formally experimental poems open into intimate explorations of fraternal loss and grief, love and romantic partnership, disability and the fragile human form, and the peculiar shapes memory takes. In one section—part essay, part crown of sonnets—the poet addresses the childhood accident that forever debilitated his hand, widening his aperture to the world and transforming his perception. Ultimately, through that experience and others, Waldman asks how—or whether—one can ever truly relate to another, or to the world. Exploring presence and absence, proximity and distance, this “gorgeous, speculative” (David Baker, author of Whale Fall) debut announces D.S. Waldman as an intrepid new voice in poetry.