Small Waiting Objects, Poems by T.D. Walker

Nominated for an Elgin Award

In the near future, kitchen appliances question, console, and bewilder their owners. Extraterrestrials leave behind sub-dermal implants and complicated daughters. A second moon settles into orbit around Earth, a moon which challenges those beneath it to see it, to name it, to explore it. And crew members aboard starships turn to fine and pulp art as consolation. The lyric poems in Small Waiting Objects reach back to feminist utopias and onward toward possible futures in which we find ourselves resisting the technologies-and their human implications-that we most desire.

Sample Poems by T.D. Walker

"Are we really just one generation away from seismograph implants, or does it just feel that way? Like a second moon, T.D. Walker's eerie, speculative poems may cause readers to recalibrate themselves. Let this book be your bus to Oz."-Jessy Randall

" In her powerful debut volume, Small Waiting Objects, T.D. Walker explores the profound ambivalence of what it is to be a creature of volition and yet forever caught, expectant, instrumental, seen, as objects are, still almost, and never still enough. The stopped watch, the name on a tomb, the moon we never reach-they remind us not only of where we have been, but where we are headed, a place of great uncertainty with a face of stone. Thus these poems resonate as both personal and cultural, scientific and psychological, mournful and yet, by imaginative grace, capable of hard-earned sublimity, where the dissipation of ideals gives way to a more capacious beauty, the moon endowed with a thousand weights 'to relieve it of its lightness.'"-Bruce Bond

"Extending the feminist science fiction of Margaret Cavendish, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Margaret Atwood in speculative poems that traverse time and remix male-dominated scientific and technological narratives, T.D. Walker chronicles near-futures in Small Waiting Objects . Visionary and dystopian, the book gives voice to female figures in the patriarchy: we hear from a sentient robot kept by a male owner and a space explorer who will never be the male captain of the ship: ' How strange to be/an explorer with nowhere/to go except down/the hall, into the archive. ' Vignettes on simulation, moon goddesses, an Earth exit visa, and a mapping of the canals of Mars all signal the book's concern with the role that instrumentation plays in perception. What this book knows, and entertainingly performs, is that poetry itself is an advanced technology, one that can alternatively travel what may otherwise be out of reach." -Amy Catanzano

"Walker's verse is simultaneously lyrical and restless, reflective and unforgiving. Digital ghosts and transmissions from deep space haunt a pastoral landscape filled with memory and regret. Each poem is a postmodern elegy to a world left empty and echoing with loved ones' absences. Bones and beloved objects are its sole survivors."-A.J. Odasso

"The poems in T.D. Walker's Small Waiting Objects are both lyrically stunning and astutely observant. Rural Texas is rendered otherworldly, turning the ordinary extraordinary and vice versa-a place where human connection is that much more important because it's the thing which anchors us like gravity. In these wise and wholly original poems, we encounter the everyday minutiae of our world as if seeing it for the first time, having set foot on a new and unfamiliar planet-a planet surprising and strange and haunted."-Melissa Morphew

ISBN: 978-1625493118, 102 pages

Order from Amazon