The Poets: a novella

William Walsh

2024

The Poets is a novella in the form of a census. It is a cavalcade of poets real and imagined. Young poets take their first steps into print and find a voice which they attach to their name. They travel through their middle years—marrying, making babies, divorcing, winning prizes, losing face. And at last they age, burnishing their reputations and settling scores as they face their readers’ scrutiny and their own mortality.

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“A stunning river of words.”

—Sara Pirkle, author of The Disappearing Act

“A collective biography of all the poets in our midst—the famous, the infamous, the obscure, and the quotidian. Sentence by sentence, The Poets reveals the poetic in the prosaic, and the various ways that art reveals the human in both.”

—Pedro Ponce, author of The Devil and the Dairy Princess: Stories

“It’s rare to find a genre-defying work that is by turns—and sometimes all at once—absurdly comedic, straight-faced satirical, psychologically insightful, and unexpectedly heartbreaking. The Poets is such a work, and readers are bound to see—somewhere in its fun-house mirrors—their worlds, their neighbors, themselves.”

—Joseph Fasano, author of The Dark Heart of Every Living Thing

Available to order at your local bookshop.

Also via retailers including Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Blackwells, Wordery & Amazon US UK DE FR ES IT NL PL SE JP CA

ISBN 978-1-916541-03-0

Excerpt on Minor Literature[s] & author interview in Necessary Fiction