It Is As If Desire is a collection of occasional poems (poems written for specific occasions) that examine, deconstruct, disrupt, and celebrate love and friendship. The language of these 10-line poems is taut, while their spirit is open and loose. As the title suggests, these poems see love and desire as often conditional, fragmentary states. In this dialectic between life and love, it is up to the poems themselves to provide the ultimate synthesis.
“I love this terrific, glowing book, and you will too, at least if you love excellent poetry, and especially if you love excellent poetry about love. Terence Winch shows marriage in all its constancy and bravery, his attachment ‘tough as tree bark.’ (These poems are) wild, skillful, and complex in their clear-eyed look at decades of meals, music-making, and wonder. Yes, yes, yes.'” — Elinor Nauen
“In this startling, totally original book of occasional poems, we find a recipe for how to live, how to love. When you open it, here’s some of the treasure you’ll find: fearlessness, supreme intelligence, rhetorical force delivered through a wonderfully insistent, biblical parallelism (biblical in the best sense of the word). You’ll find song, a musician’s sense of the line, great story-telling, imagination (that feeling of being everywhere at once), and most of all, great heart. Thank goodness this book’s now with us—it speaks for all us: ‘We like the kind of time that you wind up / and set free, the minutes released from captivity….’” —Donald Berger
“This book is a knock-out that will lift your spirits.” — Chris Mason
It Is As If Desire is a collection of occasional poems (poems written for specific occasions) that examine, deconstruct, disrupt, and celebrate love and friendship. The language of these 10-line poems is taut, while their spirit is open and loose. As the title suggests, these poems see love and desire as often conditional, fragmentary states. In this dialectic between life and love, it is up to the poems themselves to provide the ultimate synthesis.
“In this startling, totally original book of occasional poems, we find a recipe for how to live, how to love. When you open it, here’s some of the treasure you’ll find: fearlessness, supreme intelligence, rhetorical force delivered through a wonderfully insistent, biblical parallelism (biblical in the best sense of the word). You’ll find song, a musician’s sense of the line, great story-telling, imagination (that feeling of being everywhere at once), and most of all, great heart. Thank goodness this book’s now with us—it speaks for all us: ‘We like the kind of time that you wind up / and set free, the minutes released from captivity….’”
—Donald Berger
“I love this terrific, glowing book, and you will too, at least if you love excellent poetry, and especially if you love excellent poetry about love. Terence Winch shows marriage in all its constancy and bravery, his attachment ‘tough as tree bark.’ (These poems are) wild, skillful, and complex in their clear-eyed look at decades of meals, music-making, and wonder. Yes, yes, yes.'” — Elinor Nauen
“Wit, warmth, style, passion, ingenuity, acumen, and spirit are poetry’s seven cardinal virtues. Terence Winch has them all.” — David Lehman
“This book is a knock-out that will lift your spirits.”
— Chris Mason