THE CONFESSIONAL MODE in American poetry is alive and well, judging from Michael Walsh's collection. He has a lot to work with--growing up queer and Catholic on a dairy farm would provide some strong material all by itself, but Walsh's biological father also had children by Walsh's mother's sister, so he has cousins who are half-siblings, and he had a physically abusive and possibly deranged stepfather as well.
It's a wonder he emerged as any kind of functioning adult, to say nothing of his developing the calm, balanced, exacting, and sometimes even humorous voice of these poems.
The volume's main artery is memory, but fantasy runs alongside it, possible lives that did not happen ("My Mother as a Pregnant Teenage Runaway," "My Mother with Dozens of Gay Sons," "Eight Dreams on the Run with my Father").
Walsh avoids the temptation to sound a note of forgiveness and reconciliation, which is a little refreshing, actually. Instead, we have understanding...and relief that one understood in time to save one's own life. The distinctness of Walsh's voice is suggested by his being able to explain that self-understanding using the imagery of quantum mechanics.
The Queer as Electron
Knowing my identity
in the family could shift
with each observer, I watched
how a turn of phrase, a silence could switch me
from brother to cousin, from momma's boy
to daddy's bad seed, from gay
to confused virgin, and back again
in the blink of a sentence.
Without moving, I dodged them.
Inside the whirling cloud,
I formed myself in opposition
to their background radiation.
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