Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor

Poetry. The title of Terence Winch’s newest collection says it all: the wonderfully droll, self-deprecating, hard-hitting and deliciously comic narrator of these poems knows only too well what life exacts from us. A trivial event like losing one’s watch and replacing it brings on the rueful recognition that ‘it ran so fast, / I had to live every day / as if it were tomorrow.’ It’s a dilemma we all face. No rest for the weary! As the narrator of ‘Low Life’ puts it, ‘You must still explain to the babysitter what has to be done.’ In a sequence of dazzling and poignant memory poems about love and death, friendship and family trauma, Winch once again displays his uncanny ability to take the most ordinary of incidents and endow them with radiance. One reads FALLING OUT OF BED IN A ROOM WITH NO FLOOR with a steady shock of recognition. Here WE are!–Marjorie Perloff.