Donating Organs in Boxes

David Walker's Donating Organs in Boxes is not merely a collection of love poems. Instead, they blend the grit and tenderness of the everyday into a manifesto of how to love through the hurdles of expectation and disappointment, each of which scenario we feel "like road salt / through a boot," both distinct and universal in their narratives. These poems are indeed about loving the beloved, but also about re-learning to love parents, childhood memories, steamed broccoli, and-sometimes the hardest of all-ourselves. "An artist can't perform miracles," but the candid, vivid moments in this collection sear straight to the complex heart of things "like the singe of a hot light bulb," and accomplishes the best of what art can do: remind us of the ephemeral beauty in connection. -Lisa Mangini, editor of Paper Nautilus The poems of David Walker's Donating Organs in Boxes know that honest love-between partners, between family, and even with the self-contains a dash of suffering and a dollop of abandonment. Walker mines topics like marriage, the Red Sox, and the extraordinary landscape of human emotion, and delivers poems that "lovers [could sob] out to end an argument." In a world so often seemingly bent on division, here is a book that argues for some much needed tenderness. -Keith Leonard, author of Ramshackle Ode What is an organ but an instrument, one that keeps us alive physically or spiritually? David Walker's Donating Organs in Boxes accomplishes both. Through the organ of the heart and maybe even a ballpark's organ, Walker skillfully invites our own contemplations on love as a job, as loss, as the endpoint of time and reason. The role of language, how it's taboo for poets to even utter the word "love," is interrogated. These skillfully executed poems, multifarious in form and narrative, draw from loves across our lifetime and our galaxy. In "You once said," Walker writes: "...I don't understand / it, but it's what I want." In Donating Organs in Boxes, "it" comes in the form of love. -Sandra Marchetti, author of Confluence and Sight Lines