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“A restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. A game-changing book.”—Rosalie Moffett, judge of the 2024 National Poetry Series
Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them. The Uncanny Valley diagram is repurposed to imagine a future Emmett Till never saw; visual instructions for line dancing stand in tension with the history of picking cotton; prayer is input as equation; a poem gerrymanders a sentence diagram. In these and other gestures, Wilson expands the possibility of what poetry can hold.
Thematically expansive and materially ambidextrous, Games for Children demonstrates how play is one of the highest forms of freedom, and in reclaiming it, our most tender truths are exposed.
“Games for Children is a visual rehearsal for the lives we are already living.”—Jeffrey Levine, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Let’s say scheme as a means to denote plan, schema as a means to indicate form, schematics as a means to name a map of function. Thus: What a poem is to do, is to be, and how it is—these questions drive Keith Wilson’s unpredictable, yet innocuous-looking stanzas as much as they do the lines, boxes, curves, and metrics working the inventive infographic-modeled lyrics. This is ‘art, the publicist of pain’ and estrangement’s own emissary. Descending the uncanny valleys of myths ancient and recent, including those told to him about his own flesh, Wilson offers a poetics in deep study of the near-real and the irreal. So, let me be real as a means to say: With Games for Children, Wilson has composed one of the most brilliant books of poetry I’ve read.”—Douglas Kearney, author of I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always
“Keith S. Wilson’s dynamic and explosive creations transform our preconceived notions of poetic structure. Through poems combining text, language, space, and graphics, Wilson ruptures and resuscitates narratives that demand a new telling while striking personal, familial, historical, racial, scientific, and mathematical chords. These poems teach us that to effectively examine official histories or sources of knowledge, we must also be fearless in dismantling the forms that produced them. Each page in this visually inventive, formally playful, and politically impactful collection reveals a poet unafraid to push beyond the conventions of the poem to arrive at an entire universe of his own remarkable making.”—Mai Der Vang, author of Primordial
“There is a physics to justice, to love, to the trajectory of a voice and life; ‘the space between // any two or more people is gravity / of a moral kind.’ Wilson brings us to poetry with an engineer’s consciousness of the elemental forces at work, and with an engineer’s eye for redesign. Games for Children bends the mind in new ways toward an unguardedness, a tenderness, and toward an awareness of language as a weighted die that Wilson frees from its habits so it may again strike us. This is a restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. It is a game-changing book.”—Rosalie Moffett, author of Making a Living