“Three years ago I picked up Marjorie Welish’s third book of poetry, The Windows Flew Open (Burning Deck, 1991), in a used bookstore in the Midwest as I was preparing to move away. I’d never read a word by her nor had anyone recommended it to me. I was searching for one last shard of mystery in a town that had been formative to my understanding of myself as a poet, and had become perhaps too familiar. In that moment for no particular reason the universe emphasized this book. I took it to Brooklyn, unpacked, read it on the subway. I now think of it as a source text—it almost always makes me want to write back to it. Welish sings the crystalline reality of the no-place that is our language: ‘I saw myself / stepping onto a movie set of rain imitating rain, / a central fiction.’ It’s that rare book that really interrogates from love and urgency why one would write poetry in the first place, in part because she makes thought itself feel inherently lyric; she makes art feel artless. Books have their own gravity—trust the ones that call you up. I’m still learning to recognize this central fiction.”
—Daniel Poppick, author of The Police (Omnidawn, 2017)