Four Way Books will publish WILLOW HAMMER in spring 2025.
At the heart of this book is a crime that one family member commits upon another, and the consequences of ignorance, denial, bargaining, complicity, and finally revelation, that reverberate through the family for five decades afterward. “You know how you can know some things / but forget you know until it’s time to remember,” the protagonist of these poems asks.
"Heartbreaking, gorgeous, seamless, smart, Willow Hammer is a stunning gift of honesty and generosity. In the central sequence, Patrick Donnelly takes us through a dazzling stream of imagistic, linguistic, and literary associations to arrive at emotional as well as factual truths about a family crime. Sister begets willow and moon, Billy begets names and cherries, mother begets milk begets moon, and back again to willow, with myth and religion among the frequent reference points. Book-ending this astonishing series are personal poems of sexuality that will be familiar to the poet’s readers, put here in the larger context of family and presented with hard-won wisdom. When the poet says, near the end of the book, 'I think I can sleep now,' you will be with him. Meanwhile, you won’t be able to put this astonishing book down."
— Martha Collins
"The poet asks, 'But what if we’re sentenced to orbit some cold giant we never seem to glimpse or forgive?' This is a book about contending with that cold giant in all its forms—in the culture, in the people who have raised us, as well as in ourselves—all the while knowing that the great forces of spirit and sexuality nourish and deplete us at once. Wry, haunted, tender, attuned to the body and all its hungers, Willow Hammer extends Patrick Donnelly’s already substantive vision and lifts it to an exquisite plateau."
— Paul Lisicky
"What a pleasure to read Willow Hammer, the mordant wit and singular lines of Patrick Donnelly’s poems—myth 'the usual Ovid shitshow,' innocence 'indeed a kind of insanity'—disabused yet full of empathy. This is a spiritual, feral, analytical poetry, one of violence and erotic control and the limits of etymology. The end result is masterful, haunting, and revelatory."
— Randall Mann
At the heart of this book is a crime that one family member commits upon another, and the consequences of ignorance, denial, bargaining, complicity, and finally revelation, that reverberate through the family for five decades afterward. “You know how you can know some things / but forget you know until it’s time to remember,” the protagonist of these poems asks.
"Heartbreaking, gorgeous, seamless, smart, Willow Hammer is a stunning gift of honesty and generosity. In the central sequence, Patrick Donnelly takes us through a dazzling stream of imagistic, linguistic, and literary associations to arrive at emotional as well as factual truths about a family crime. Sister begets willow and moon, Billy begets names and cherries, mother begets milk begets moon, and back again to willow, with myth and religion among the frequent reference points. Book-ending this astonishing series are personal poems of sexuality that will be familiar to the poet’s readers, put here in the larger context of family and presented with hard-won wisdom. When the poet says, near the end of the book, 'I think I can sleep now,' you will be with him. Meanwhile, you won’t be able to put this astonishing book down."
— Martha Collins
"The poet asks, 'But what if we’re sentenced to orbit some cold giant we never seem to glimpse or forgive?' This is a book about contending with that cold giant in all its forms—in the culture, in the people who have raised us, as well as in ourselves—all the while knowing that the great forces of spirit and sexuality nourish and deplete us at once. Wry, haunted, tender, attuned to the body and all its hungers, Willow Hammer extends Patrick Donnelly’s already substantive vision and lifts it to an exquisite plateau."
— Paul Lisicky
"What a pleasure to read Willow Hammer, the mordant wit and singular lines of Patrick Donnelly’s poems—myth 'the usual Ovid shitshow,' innocence 'indeed a kind of insanity'—disabused yet full of empathy. This is a spiritual, feral, analytical poetry, one of violence and erotic control and the limits of etymology. The end result is masterful, haunting, and revelatory."
— Randall Mann
