Poetry Collections
In the poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” William Carlos Williams writes: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
Williams may have been right about that. However, Ed Werstein, in his book Communiqué: Poems From The Headlines, tries to prove the converse: that you can get poetry from the news. Werstein’s newest collection is sectioned like a newspaper, and the poems cover a variety of topics: national news, weather, sports, and more.
In Ed Werstein’s latest collection he remembers his childhood and his love for baseball.
These words are like “signals from the stars,” lovely and surprising and filled with the stuff of good poetry: strong images, deft use of language and unerring need to have fun. Werstein is at once wise and witty, tender and precise, as he tackles a poetry, which spans the gamut from Ars Poetica to poems of witness. From poems with warning labels to the confusing label on a bottle of barbeque sauce, Werstein’s ability to see the wonder and absurdity in the everyday make this book such a joy to read. This book is a “library full of beautiful and dangerous poetry,” all of it resplendent with passion and love.
Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2017-2018) & Author of Grief Bone
A Tar Pit to Dye In finds poet Ed Werstein in funny, punning conversation with earlier poets, his internet feed, his aching knee, words themselves, and the banana peel that slips him into metaphor. “At Home and Barefoot” opens the collection with its allusions to poetry’s work, romping through Dickinson, diPrima, Stafford, Levertov, and Bishop’s views. “Citizen of the World” invites the newborn to what “America should be, could be.” “Newport Poetry Trail” turns to Lorine Niedecker, “pondering poetry / as forged as nails.” As, indeed, Werstein’s own work is, in his wry and passionate engagement with words, poetic form, love, aging, and the world as it could be.
Robin Chapman, Author of Six True Things
Published by Kelsay Books
The poems in Ed Werstein's first chapbook, Who Are We Then?, show us out society dividing further into "haves" and "have nots" as "crumbling bricks of abandoned factories" (Resolution Review). His passionate and thoughtful words, strong images, and insightful questions step down off the soapbox and march poetically straight into our hearts, with much music and gravity.
Bruce Dethlefsen, Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2011-2012)
Ed Werstein, a deeply talented practitioner of the poetry of protest, is profoundly familiar with the frustration of the powerless—and also possesses a rare ability to communicate his indignation with striking sincerity and conviction. The poems in Who Are We Then? are precisely on target, and never does Werstein allow anger and outrage to overwhelm them. If he, in his own words, has "altar-boyed and baseballed ... anti-drafted and anti-warred," the reader in turn will mind-broaden, truth-seek, and lie-detect by reading this fine collection.
Marilyn L. Taylor, Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2009-2010)
Published by Partisan Press. Cover photo: Crying Giant by Tom Otterness, photographed by Mark Luttrell.
AnthologIES
Filled with profound, lyrical, and nostalgic poems, The Songs of Summer: Poems About Baseball is the book for any baseball fan with a literary bent. Fifty-six poets exhibit their passion for the sport in a companionable collection of poems tinged with humor, sensibility, and pathos.
From Roberto Clemente and Al Kaline and Billy Martin to minor league stadiums, small town ball fields, and Little League parks, these insightful poems encompass a universe of baseball experience and appreciation. You will go back in time to the Negro Leagues and the All-American Girls League where the sounds of the ballpark become the language of poets, and the rhythm and choreographies of baseball become lines of verse.
If you are a baseball fan or simply a lover of good poetry, this is the anthology you have been waiting for, carefully selected poems that speak of a love of baseball—inning by inning, game by game, season by season, and generation to generation.
Masquerades and Misdemeanors is the first anthology of poems published by Pebblebrook Press and written by Milwaukee's very own Hartford Avenue Poets: Thomas J. Erickson, Mary Lux, Helen Padway, Kim Parsons, Kathleen H. Phillips, Barbara B. Prendergast, Sheryl Slocum, Marilyn L. Taylor, Phyllis Wax, Ed Werstein, and Mark Zimmermann.
The work is phenomenal, and there's a lot of variety in terms of style and subject matter. There's really something for everyone here—or, as the Humbert Humbert endorsement on the back cover says, "There are at least ten good poems in here which is more than in most poetry books."
Ed Werstein’s newest collection includes poems written around the climate crisis.