Book Launch – Edinburgh

I’ll be reading from my new book (that’s the cover there) live and in person.When that is done, you can join me for a party at The Forest with Jed Milroy, Hailey Beavis, Billy Liar and Black Diamond Express all playing! So, Edinburgh friends, fetch your diaries this book is coming!

When: Nov. 18th, 6.30pm
Where: Blackwells, South Bridge, Edinburgh
&
After Party @ The Forest – 8pm ish
Does it cost?: FREE

If you can’t make it to the launch but you’d like to get a copy of my book, you can find it here (UK) and here (USA, USA!)

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 light-bulb 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