That’s right! I’m coming home to Branford. I’m bring books. We’re drinking warm cidery booze, we’re listening to music from John Farias, we’re hearing poems and stories from me. Please, if you are in the North East (or around Branford, I guess), come come come. I hope to see you there!

You can check out the book and EVEN BUY IT — HERE!!!

Dec. 23rd. 7pm.- Blackstone Library, Branford, CT — FREE FREE FREE
Ryan Van Winkle and Friends
Poems from Ryan Van Winkle’s prize-winning début collection ‘Tomorrow, We Will Live Here ‘.
Music from John Farias.
Free drinks and nibbles.

This is a terse, tough début by an award-winning American poet with punch in the language. What you find here is the grist of life – death, love, sex, departure – honed by a voice obsessed with the gravity, fear and the humour of being human. Van Winkle’s understated, plain spoken, narrators are as diverse as the America they live in – the lonely night nurse, the conflicted son of a preacher, and the cross-country runner – are all ill at ease in the world. Through road kill, September 11th, and death row they address their own bitter faults with noir-like melancholy, seeking redemption and absolution.

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Praise:

‘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, author of Redgrove’s Wife (Bloodaxe, 2006)

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“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, author of Grain (Picador, 2009)

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“’Let the dust dance/ in the shotgun/ beams’…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, The Darwin Poems
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‘These are thrilling poems in a confident and rich collection.’Tom Pow, author of Dear Alice (Salt 2008)