The Backwards Year collects poems written between June 2018 back to June 2017, more or less, in reverse order and juxtaposes the poet's childhood with love poems for his own neural atypical children, Clare and Gabriel. The book returns to childhood in some of its rhyming poems, but also by exploring the dark spaces where childhood is a kind of fevered dream that keeps informing and shaping the present. This is the most reflective and meditative book Weil has written yet. |
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In the poems of The Backwards Year we are never in one world only. There is this world with its "large plates of baked lima beans" and aunts smoking Pall Mall reds. Then there is the world built of the eternal, which is not always the afterlife, but the world made of those indelible moments where the poet is "still swinging / that book bag with all my might." The Backwards Year contains poems of unabashed faith, of love for the poet's children, political poems that carry a sting Alexander Pope might envy. In other words, this is the record of a life fully lived and fully recognized. Joe Weil is a large talent, and I will follow his poems anywhere.
—Al Maginnes
Every time I think Joe Weil cannot possibly get any better as a poet, he amazes me. This is a truly incredible book that celebrates the world in all its grief and terror. It's full of remembrance of past time and detailed celebrations of birds and incantations to his children. It is full of surprises, introducing poems that use form elegantly and that carry us along on their sprung rhythms, interspersed with poems written in lyrical free verse. This book proves what a master poet Joe Weil is and how important it is that he connects us to all that is beautiful in our lives and in ourselves.
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan
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