First Book of Poetry by David Weiss

David Weiss’s deeply human and astonishing first book, In Memoriam is a wondrous contradiction. Built on grief’s scaffold, his experiment struggles with language being both wholly inadequate and as a possible means of freedom. Weiss’s poetic meta-manifesto travels in giant steps from Revelations through Celan to Saturday Night Live, expanding inward and outward at once, into worlds where moments of ease are shot through with COVID statistics and grief is threaded with hilarity. We join Weiss on his meander through politics, poetry, and personal history, where he questions how to walk into a river without sinking, without stones? Where the interrogated i/I/eye is at war with my tongue & by extension, my mind, and where wyrding how the frame is the center. Don’t read for mastery, Weiss cautions. Read this for mastery.– Maryrose Larkin, author of The Name of This Intersection Is Frost & The Identification of Ghosts