Reviews of Michael Walsh's The Dirt Riddles

Michael Walsh’s The Dirt Riddles is a focused and autobiographical first book. It mines his experience growing up on what is surely the most revolting farm I have ever seen lovingly depicted. Much of the book pushes back against a pastoral and eco-romantic tradition (think of this as the anti-“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”) to insist on the primacy of waste, rot, mold and filth as the foundation of his childhood, and moreover, as the foundation of all flesh. His father is a violent, unpredictable man, though with a penchant for singing around the house and dropping his towel. His mother is more nurturing, but as powerful and muscular. Walsh discovers his sexuality in violence, an internal and external violence continue to hover over his grown up life.

—Lamda Literary...click here for more

Michael Walsh’s first book, The Dirt Riddles (winner of the 2010 Arkansas Poetry Prize) offers a corrective to the hyper-romanticized vision of rural life that has long dominated the American imagination. He does this through short, delicate lyrics that observe life on and around a dairy farm, crafting an anti-pastoral pastoral marked by an attitude of tenderness towards their land, even as our speaker(s) eye does not flinch from the ugly, gross, aggressive or uncomfortable. It’s possible that many poems we consider classically pastoral contain these anti-pastoral threads. In this light, Walsh does not eschew a tradition as much as he simply updates its expression. Furthermore, while the pastoral is indeed aesthetic, “farm life” is experiential, and these poems write through the latter even more than it adopts the conventions of the former.

—Constant Critic...click here for more

The Dirt Riddles is a sober and quiet reflection on rural life, composed by Michael Walsh. The poems highlight many of the themes of agrarian life: the constant attendance to the sky, the soil, and the wind as well as the more routine chores of keeping the home place in order. There is a solitary feel to the poems, a reflection on the inner mood rather than the outside. In fact, reading these feels like eavesdropping...hearing a quiet voice observe and evaluate their surroundings unsuppressed by inhibitions. And yet, these aren't sullen or gloomy either. The introspective voice is aware, calm, and natural. There are no awkward metaphors or complicated allusions. The simplicity is deceiving.

—The Black Sheep Dances...click here for more