American Crush

The language in Robert Walicki's American Crush is urgent, exhausted, and alive. These poems know what it costs to drive a jackhammer, fall from a ladder, to love someone through a grinding life, or watch a father burn out like a furnace. Written in the great tradition of Levine and Carver but with a voice unmistakably his own, Walicki finds the sacred in trench line and steel ash, in a baseball mitt stiff as a dead hand, in a grandmother watching the NBA from her hospital bed. This is American working-class lyric at its finest: unsparing, tender, and true.

-Dion O'Reilly, author of Limerence

Visceral and gritty, weaving lyrical threads through rich narrative pieces, Bob Walicki's American Crush is a heart-rending ride. From blue collar work to sports, health, and life in Western Pennsylvania, Walicki's poems are deeply embodied through place, time, and memory. This wonderful collection pulls you in and reminds you, "Still, there is rapture here, in these watery hills, bluer than memory."

         -Cameron Barnett, author of Murmur and The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water

Bob Walicki's poems throb with the intensity of pneumatic drills. He thrusts us into a world of steelworkers and plumbers where "you pounded your hand into the wall when the hammer slipped on the scissor life in 5-degree weather . . . so cold you couldn't bleed" and yet surprises us with lyrical passages: "the salt thick hills of Clairton/ where it's dark enough to start over, paint our way out into/the slow burn of daylight/ and a sky rising blue enough, we can see rainfall's painted edge. . ." These poems are powerful and tender, urgent and sweet.

-Shaheen Dil is an award-winning poet and the author of three full-length poetry collections.

The glorious, compelling poems in this incandescent collection prove that Robert Walicki is an alchemist as well as a poet and plumber: He transforms grief and rage into poetic gold. He bears witness to dirty construction work, stunted lives, casual cruelties, and his own injured body, honoring them with lush lyricism. His vivid images are born of an exhilarating freedom of imagination. Here suffering is counterbalanced by the magnificence of nature and the alluring mysteries of eroticism; the poems about music dance on the page. When Walicki asks, in his sizzling tribute to Tina Turner, "What's love got to do with any of this?", the answer comes roaring back: "Only everything." 

--Judith Sanders, author of In Deep and The Universe with Borscht