Reed Turchi’s debut collection, Dancing with Poets, explores what it means to make—and re-make—oneself amid a swirl of love, loss, and memory. In dive bars and art museums, baseball stadiums and blues clubs, Turchi summons his ghosts and invites them to sing their songs. A Grammy Award–winning musician as well as poet, Turchi is guided by finely honed rhythm and a singular sonic sensibility that coaxes music from poems that are narrative and lyric in turn. As a collection, Dancing with Poets remembers those the author has loved and lost, but avoids nostalgia, asking instead what futures may be built from grief and how love may grow on the other side of devastation. While the poems may swirl, their emotional truth remains crystalline: The characters, moments, and stories in each poem are infinitely recognizable—fantastic and quotidian in equal measure. Within these poems there are chicken tenders and high art, motorcycles and funerals—a familiar boyhood that happened to be spent surrounded by some of the finest American poets of the late twentieth century. In Dancing with Poets, Turchi invites his reader to join him—“to strut and spin” in grief and joy alike.

“The poems in Dancing with Poets do that—they dance, rhythmically, as they swirl through, around, and within their narratives. These incantatory poems draw you in as they fuse the speaker’s voice with the reader’s imagination. The comma, the em dash, and the line break enact the drama so that what we have transcends the speaker, transcends the drama, and transcends the many elegized in these poems. ‘Forgive me. We hold on to what / we can, & then we lose it anyway, // because such music cannot last—,’ the poet writes in the stunning opening poem, ‘Swannanoa: Swirl & Vortex,’ yet what’s left on these pages sings and sings . . .” 

—Victoria Chang