Overview

""A restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. A game-changing book.""-Rosalie Moffett, judge of the 2024 National Poetry Series Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them. The Uncanny Valley diagram is repurposed to imagine a future Emmett Till never saw; visual instructions for line dancing stand in tension with the history of picking cotton; prayer is input as equation; a poem gerrymanders a sentence diagram. In these and other gestures, Wilson expands the possibility of what poetry can hold. Thematically expansive and materially ambidextrous, Games for Children demonstrates how play is one of the highest forms of freedom, and in reclaiming it, our most tender truths are exposed.

Full Product Details

9781639551279

Table of Contents

Reviews

“There is a physics to justice, to love, to the trajectory of a voice and life; ‘the space between // any two or more people is gravity / of a moral kind.’ Wilson brings us to poetry with an engineer’s consciousness of the elemental forces at work, and with an engineer’s eye for redesign. Games for Children bends the mind in new ways toward an unguardedness, a tenderness, and toward an awareness of language as a weighted die that Wilson frees from its habits so it may again strike us. This is a restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. It is a game-changing book.”—Rosalie Moffett, author of Making a Living

“Keith S. Wilson’s dynamic and explosive creations transform our preconceived notions of poetic structure. Through poems combining text, language, space, and graphics, Wilson ruptures and resuscitates narratives that demand a new telling while striking personal, familial, historical, racial, scientific, and mathematical chords. These poems teach us that to effectively examine official histories or sources of knowledge, we must also be fearless in dismantling the forms that produced them. Each page in this visually inventive, formally playful, and politically impactful collection reveals a poet unafraid to push beyond the conventions of the poem to arrive at an entire universe of his own remarkable making.”—Mai Der Vang, author of Primordial “There is a physics to justice, to love, to the trajectory of a voice and life; ‘the space between // any two or more people is gravity / of a moral kind.’ Wilson brings us to poetry with an engineer’s consciousness of the elemental forces at work, and with an engineer’s eye for redesign. Games for Children bends the mind in new ways toward an unguardedness, a tenderness, and toward an awareness of language as a weighted die that Wilson frees from its habits so it may again strike us. This is a restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. It is a game-changing book.”—Rosalie Moffett, author of Making a Living

Author Information

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. He was a Gregory Djanikian Scholar, and his poetry has won the Rumi Prize and been anthologized in Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Wilson's book Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love was recognized by The New York Times as a best new book of poetry. He lives in Chicago.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available