Book Launch — London

I’ll be reading from my new book (that’s the cover there) live and in person. That means you’ll be the first people in the world to be able to buy and hold and look for typos in my first ever book. Also, there will be some of the other Crashaw Prize Winning poets there all  hanging out, making merry and reading poems. You should come. Because I like seeing you and we will have fun.

When: Nov. 11th, 7pm

Where: Phoenix Artist’s Club, at Charing Cross Road, London

Does it cost?: Nobody has told me yet.

Here’s some nice things people have said:

“Tensions and exchanges between the generations, together with a fearless scrutiny of the self, distinguish this driven and forceful collection.  Here is a new and authentic voice with a punch in the language.” Penelope Shuttle

“Speakers recount memories that haunt them, as they seek forgetfulness or redemption. The filmic clarity of Van Winkle’s narrative shows they will be granted neither. These are thrilling poems in a confident and rich collection.” Tom Pow

“Van Winkle is a straight-talker with a good heart. This collection cuts through the fluff and gets to me, these poems are like hearing what you already know to be the truth.” Withered Hand

“It’s like Allen Ginsberg come back to life, beard and all. Van Winkle lights a Tom Waits lightbulb in these melodic snapshots, an elegy to the loved, the lost, the fallen, and to America itself.” Emily Ballou

“This luminous collection begins with the workings of the author’s ghost and ends on a bar stool contemplation of days lived and quietly lost. In between is all the richness and wonder of things. Like a ghost, he returns again and again to concern himself with the workings of the dead, gravity, the passage of time; growing up and growing old. If he had picked up a guitar rather than a palette,  these are the songs Edward Hopper would have sung. They are songs of the season past, of the waning day, of the half lived life.  But there’s nothing melancholic about this book – far from it – the poems are shot through with light, with a determined joy. Van Winkle’s strength as a poet lies in his ability to focus on the quiet epiphanies that transform loss into wonder and wonder into art.” John Glenday