tulsa non-poems

Combine Emerson with Kerouac, put them in a post-pandemic Tulsa dive bar with good music, and they still might not write this book but would read it with fiercest interest. The energetic language, the raw confession, the radiant pain - together they lift these low moments into a kind of spiraling transcendence you can't tear your eyes from. This book is for people who like to turn off the technology and listen when it rains hard."

-J.T. Bushnell, author of The Step Back

"If Walt Whitman had watched a lot of television and gone to countless music festivals, he would have been Walter Moore. One of my favorite poets."

-David Shields, author of Reality Hunger

"In the midst of losing everything, Walter Moore found Tulsa. From this unlikely harbor, Walter gives us a heart-rich collection of hurt and beauty. Walter carries us along on trips and road trips, through deserts and dive bars, hidden meditation spots, near-mythical holy homes of live music, cemeteries, forests, coffee shops, and Tulsa's one Buddhist temple. At each stop, Walter takes us through heartache, mindache, and a deep, sustaining desire to heal-always with the compassion and blade-juggling wit I've loved in all his work. In this collection, more so than ever, Walter's words and thoughts twist with bone-core pain, prayerful God-hunger, and the wise-eyed gratitude of a soul who has survived."

-Owen Egerton, author of Hollow

"Walter Moore doesn't write poems-he writes portals. To read his latest is to encounter the raw and rough-hewn emotion of midlife upheavals, the startling transcendence of humor and suffering in a Texan's Oklahoma, the atmospheric glow that can emanate from the right dive-bar music-and so much more. Read these pages for the same reason you would make friends with an alluring stranger: to share this short, messy beautiful life with someone who might just understand."  

-John Larison, author of Whiskey When We're Dry

"These (non-)poems are clear-eyed and big-hearted-they show you Tulsa from the eyes of a man who's been knocked down but is getting back on his feet. It's all here: bad relationships, good music, Christ at Best Buy, tiki bars, Toyota Corollas, and the most honest graduation speech I've ever read. Like the man says, read if you feel like it. You might learn something."

-Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun