Diane Wald

“My brain was famous, but I was not. Not every gifted child invents a pollutant-free fuel, paints a masterpiece, or finds the cure for cancer,” Jack MacLeod tells us. “Some of us just live out our lives.” Jack died in 1974; now, he’s ready to narrate his story from beyond the grave. Jack’s prodigious memory, which allows him to memorize books, and his penchant for psychic connections give him unusual insights into the events of his past life and make him fiercely curious about his current state of existence. Jack immerses us in interconnected tales of his childhood participation in a research study on the intellectually gifted, his dual career as a clinical psychologist and university professor, his participation in the unmasking of an unscrupulous colleague, his long-term health issues, his brief but life-changing love affair with a student, his deep friendship with another man, and his eventual acceptance and celebration of the circumstances of his fate. How Jack dies, and how he deals with the murder of someone close to him, mirrors how he has lived and grown, and marks the significance of everyone and everything that ultimately brings him to yet another level of brilliance.

Boston, 1984. Even in a world without cell phones, messages come through loud and clear if one is listening. When thirty-something Nora Forrest traveled to Manhattan to see a Broadway play starring her idol, an aging Irish actor named Hugh Sheenan, she doesn't know whether what happened in the theater that night should be credited to witchcraft, extrasensory perception, synchronicity, or simple accident—and she knows that many people would have told her nothing had happened at all.

Revealed through the voices of just four people, Gillyflower is a story about intersections and connections—real, imaginary, seized, and eluded. It’s a book about everyday magic, crystalline memory, and the details that flow through time and space like an electrified mist. Gillyflower is a detective story, a love story, and a coming-of-age story—for the never really young and for the almost old. 

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The fourth full-length poetry collection from award-winning poet and novelist Diane Wald. Poet Sandra Doller says "This book is fantastic and just what I needed--rich and full and a reminder of everything important," and poet John Gallaher calls it a "marvelous new collection" where "we're presented with the most trustworthy of voices, one simmering a long time in its experience. I'm reading this book wanting to underline every word, answering, yes, yes, it's just like this..."

"I cannot stop reading Diane Wald’s Wonderbender, and, all the while, I am enthralled by the title, realizing Diane Wald is a wordbender and knowing that the book shifts with each reading: 1. Bender as Re-shaper of Wonder:  The book includes astonishing stories with missing parts floating between specificity and mystery.  The tension between the transience of telling and the substantiality of the said.  (“wonder is bent at various times/quickly/and often invisibly/you don’t realize till later”.)  2. Bender as Makeshift Shelter: Like a dream caught in a dream caught in a dream house.  (“my dream last night of the realtors/who sold me people from the past/disguised as houses”).  3. Bender as Binge: Drunk on a sweetness and a sharpness.  Drunk on the “veridical hallucinations.”  4. The book as Worldbender: Inside these poems our consciousnesses touch.  In the remarkable title poem, the dentist discovers a field of wildflowers in the x-rays of Wald’s mouth—and we say, “Yes, of course”--because we have also experienced the wonder."   
               --Patrick Lawler, author of Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds

 

 "Informality was queen. King?" Wald asks near the middle of her smart new collection, and she goes on to establish its curious reign: the Bohemianism of her open-ended poems and sequences charts a middle course between Steinian cadences and the chattiness of second- or third-generation Beats. Long-lined, multi-page efforts (some bordering on the conversational prose poem) venture out into the world with explanations that hazily invoke the autobiographical ("I awoke with a backache because of all this dreaming and boating") then veer into abstract territory: "Everything has become/ what it least expected." Wald's longer works can feel less like discrete poems than like journals, but they are compelling, inventive journals, full of "Ideas in bed/ and how they fled." While the sequence "The Fear As the Height of Folly" offers exceptional examples of attention to each word, other work (including the four-page title poem) promises exactly the opposite, a casual propulsion attention (a la Bernadette Mayer) that renders ideas and images as they arrive. After decades of small-press and chapbook publishing (Wald's last collection, Lucid Suitcase, appeared from Red Hen in 1999), Wald offers not a debut so much as a comeback volume, and while she does participate in the jumpy humor common to much recent poets, she also acts out a kind of confidence that remains hers alone: "Why don't you/ set out to do what you must in your own world and not worry about the rest." Readers will find Wald lives up to this dictum wonderfully."

                       --Publishers Weekly

 "The poems in Lucid Suitcase speak to the life and art they portray as only poems full of wonder do, with plausible inevitability....I have been following Diane Wald's work closely since the 1970s. Her poems always engage me. And how often entering her poems is like winding up in a dream...and then I get the feeling I have always "dreamed" (i.e. lived!) this."
              --Michael Burkard, author of Entire Dilemma and many other volumes