Games for Children

“Keith S. Wilson’s dynamic and explosive creations transform our preconceived notions of poetic structure. Through poems combining text, language, space, and graphics, Wilson ruptures and resuscitates narratives that demand a new telling while striking personal, familial, historical, racial, scientific, and mathematical chords. These poems teach us that to effectively examine official histories or sources of knowledge, we must also be fearless in dismantling the forms that produced them. Each page in this visually inventive, formally playful, and politically impactful collection reveals a poet unafraid to push beyond the conventions of the poem to arrive at an entire universe of his own remarkable making.”

“There is a physics to justice, to love, to the trajectory of a voice and life; ‘the space between // any two or more people is gravity / of a moral kind.’ Wilson brings us to poetry with an engineer’s consciousness of the elemental forces at work, and with an engineer’s eye for redesign. Games for Children bends the mind in new ways toward an unguardedness, a tenderness, and toward an awareness of language as a weighted die that Wilson frees from its habits so it may again strike us. This is a restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. It is a game-changing book.”