KIERON WALQUIST
With a cinematic eye and through various formal interventions, Kieron Walquist's Love Locks brings us into the landscapes of Walquist's youth in rural Missouri. These landscapes are physical and emotional terrains—filled with animals broken under human hands, the detritus of trash heaps, and torched homes—fields that articulate the devastation of rural poverty, the casualties of addiction, and the ways in which queerness survives in such hyper-masculine environments. Walquist writes with firm precision and with an unspoken and unexpected generosity between each aching line.
—Niki Herd, author of The Language of Shedding Skin
Praise for LOVE LOCKS
Walquist asks the dead "To teach me / to hold + forgive the violences. Walk / in + against the rain, absolutely / alive." These virtuosic, deeply felt + feeling poems have taught me again how to do just that. It's a gift I'm grateful for.
—Carl Phillips, author of Then the War
These poems brilliantly reinvent the world by waking us into its unrelenting oddity as they collectively become an ingenious record of the trajectory of one who escaped a hardscrabble beginning and now moves through this wonderland hoping to find like-minded others, perhaps someone who might answer the question, "The world—/ does it scar first then heal perfect, if at all?"
—Mary Jo Bang, author of A Doll for Throwing
Kieron Walquist's poems are thrilling. He yokes together violences and intimacies, arranges language into dazzling and resonant patterns, and breaks open memory to release music that's torqued and incandescent. This music is queer, rooted in Missouri, and announces the arrival of a voice that sings to and against the place that birthed it.
—Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine
Reading the poems in Kieron Walquist's Love Locks is like witnessing the genteel kid from school who pulls a switchblade at the sleepover—all at once, you're startled unnerved, and spellbound.
—Elijah Burrell, author of Troubler and Skin of the River
We move through Love Locks the way one might encounter a town over time—slowly at first, noticing random objects by the side of the road or the kids throwing rocks at each other, laughing innocently. And then out of nowhere, the town becomes yours; the town becomes part of you. This is the beauty of Love Locks !
—Luther Hughes, 2022 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest Judge and author of A Shiver in the Leaves