Iridescent Pigeons

$17.99

Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh is now available as a paperback or PDF (you can order multiple copies at a discount here). Candace’s poems in Iridescent Pigeons, her debut chapbook, serve as a restoration project by articulating the everyday unsaid of love, not just in romantic contexts, but as a friend, sister, daughter, dog parent, wildflower admirer, and mother. Amid free verse, Candace’s use of archaic poetic forms (the Sapphic stanza, ode, curtal sonnet, and cento) and homages to Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins claims literary legacies that have historically excluded women and queer writers.

This wry celebration of good, bad, ugly, thirsty, reverent, compassionate, unrequited, and fully granted love rouses new lexicons of connection and belonging. As poet J. Allyn Rosser observes of Candace, “Her poems—intensely, warily—celebrate familial, platonic, and romantic bonds, even as they ponder vestiges of the trauma love can leave behind.”

Candace is a queer poet, fiction writer, and essayist with Cuban and Greek ancestry and New York and New Mexico roots. She currently calls pastoral southeast Ohio home, where she lives in an old farmhouse with her wife, their two dogs, hundreds of books, and every kitchen and camping gadget you didn’t know you needed (most recent addition: cherry pitter). Iridescent Pigeons is for the black sheep, the eldest daughters, the overly ardent friends, the dissociated, the dispossessed, the ones surprised by love, and the eschewers of received wisdom. The unashamed divorcees, the lost cousins, the off-season travelers, and the cockamamie schemers. The late-in-life lesbians, those called “precocious” and “old souls” as children, the truth-blurters, and the ruminators. The Heathers with two mommies and the exvangelical pantheists, the brash empaths, and the shy extroverts. The family archivists, the stationery collectors, and the forgetful overcommitters. The underestimated and the overcompensators, and all those hungry for the everyday unsaid.

You can learn more about Candace in a conversation between the author and Melissa Nunez, Yellow Arrow interviewer, at:

yellowarrowpublishing.com/news/humble-glorious-interview-candace-walsh

Cover art by Anna Chotlos and cover design by Laura M. André.

Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Iridescent Pigeons by Candace Walsh is now available as a paperback or PDF (you can order multiple copies at a discount here). Candace’s poems in Iridescent Pigeons, her debut chapbook, serve as a restoration project by articulating the everyday unsaid of love, not just in romantic contexts, but as a friend, sister, daughter, dog parent, wildflower admirer, and mother. Amid free verse, Candace’s use of archaic poetic forms (the Sapphic stanza, ode, curtal sonnet, and cento) and homages to Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins claims literary legacies that have historically excluded women and queer writers.

This wry celebration of good, bad, ugly, thirsty, reverent, compassionate, unrequited, and fully granted love rouses new lexicons of connection and belonging. As poet J. Allyn Rosser observes of Candace, “Her poems—intensely, warily—celebrate familial, platonic, and romantic bonds, even as they ponder vestiges of the trauma love can leave behind.”

Candace is a queer poet, fiction writer, and essayist with Cuban and Greek ancestry and New York and New Mexico roots. She currently calls pastoral southeast Ohio home, where she lives in an old farmhouse with her wife, their two dogs, hundreds of books, and every kitchen and camping gadget you didn’t know you needed (most recent addition: cherry pitter). Iridescent Pigeons is for the black sheep, the eldest daughters, the overly ardent friends, the dissociated, the dispossessed, the ones surprised by love, and the eschewers of received wisdom. The unashamed divorcees, the lost cousins, the off-season travelers, and the cockamamie schemers. The late-in-life lesbians, those called “precocious” and “old souls” as children, the truth-blurters, and the ruminators. The Heathers with two mommies and the exvangelical pantheists, the brash empaths, and the shy extroverts. The family archivists, the stationery collectors, and the forgetful overcommitters. The underestimated and the overcompensators, and all those hungry for the everyday unsaid.

You can learn more about Candace in a conversation between the author and Melissa Nunez, Yellow Arrow interviewer, at:

yellowarrowpublishing.com/news/humble-glorious-interview-candace-walsh

Cover art by Anna Chotlos and cover design by Laura M. André.

Thank you for supporting independent publishing.

Reviews:

“The homing instincts in Candace Walsh’s Iridescent Pigeons are unerring, each poem crafting a sure flight to quiet revelation. Braiding past and present, childhood and motherhood, and loss and love, Walsh’s luminous, acutely observed collection is ultimately a song of praise, honoring the sensuous beauty of everyday life.”

--Debra Allbery, author of Fimbul-Winter and Walking Distance

“Candace Walsh’s soulful, intimate, diction-rich poems span forms, eras, and musics to get down to the sources of this constant memory-flooded movement we call the present.”

--Anselm Berrigan, author of Something for Everybody

“Come for the influence of Virginia Woolf, stay for the ‘Dogs and Their Lesbians’! Inventing new forms and reinvigorating old language, from the opening poem’s index/list-form to homages to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sacred profane, to Sapphic stanzas, this collection of poems shows us hard-won love and quietly triumphant queer eros and joy. Walsh’s poems vibrate with meter, rhythm, and the language of Romantic poets brought to 21st century relationships. There is music here, all kinds, and we are in good hands with a speaker who reminds herself who she is by ‘scream-singing to the Pixies.’”

--Margaret Ray, author of Good Grief, the Ground

“Candace Walsh’s poems are at once deeply serious and playful. I’m drawn to their voluptuous phrasing, their lexical condensations—the ‘gray-rimmed . . . sapsoft secrets’ of tree limbs—reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins, most notably in her elegantly sensuous pastiche ‘Bowed Beauty.’ There are so many stunning images here, rendered with crystalline precision: ‘a murmuration perch so dense / the barren tree seems leafed until the birds lift off at once.’ Walsh’s speakers are utterly bemused by human relationships, viewing them at times from alien distances: love as perceived by unmatched socks, by seaweed, by stray dogs. Her poems—intensely, warily—celebrate familial, platonic, and romantic bonds, even as they ponder vestiges of the trauma love can leave behind.”

--J. Allyn Rosser, author of Foiled Again and Mimi’s Trapeze

“Iridescent Pigeons is a slender volume, but it is big as an entire library, full of love, familial love, queer romantic love, love of the great poems that came before, love of the world in which we live. There is a lyric grace that runs through all these poems. Walsh is preoccupied with the literary tradition, as seen in her references to Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Elizabeth Bishop. She uses these references not as exercises but as playful springboards to make her own very unique insights about life. My favorite example is her riff on Bishop’s ‘One Art.’ There is much to remember in this beautiful book, indeed, much to learn by heart.”

--Peter Waldor, winner of the National Jewish Book Award

“Innovative and breathtaking, Candace Walsh’s Iridescent Pigeons torques traditional poetic forms to offer a queer perspective on love, relationships, and the everyday. For example, she uses the cento and Sapphic stanza, among other forms, to capture different lived experiences, which coalesce around the smallest details. Through these details, such as cracked eggs, a sugar bowl, and lemon balm, she invites her readers into different forms of intimacy. Just as a ‘sphere . . . blooms blue-green from the moon,’ each poem blooms with exquisite images, which provide alternate ways of understanding one’s relationship to one’s past, to others, and the world.”

--Shannon K. Winston, author of The Girl Who Talked to Paintings

“Iridescent Pigeons is a collection of poems that celebrates love in all its different forms, while not being afraid to explore how love also hurts; you hurt and you get hurt. In addition to love, it touches on themes such as nature, identity, loss, the passage of time, childhood and motherhood. All themes are portrayed with attention, gratitude and presence.”

--celestialdryad by em (see the rest of the review here)

“Candace Walsh’s poetry channels Mary Oliver’s. I am hoping for more from this author soon.”

--Andrea Anderson, Goodreads reviewer

Iridescent Pigeons is a fitting title for Candace Walsh’s enchanting debut—a body of work that ponders the many contours of love, that rejoices in the splendour of the everyday and the profound beauty of the overlooked and discounted. In this chapbook, Walsh traverses seamlessly across time and poetic forms, tracing themes of queer love, desire, nature, loss, motherhood, childhood, and the engravings of trauma. Each poem teems with life, beckoning readers to take a second glance, to embrace stillness, drawing us into a heightened state of awareness of ourselves and the environment around us.”

--Pelaya Arapakis (see the rest of the review here)