Timothy Daniel Welch's Odd Bloom Seen from Space

Timothy Daniel Welch's prize-winning Odd Bloom Seen from Space is now available!

Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say:
“On what do we prop our lives and/ what if it can’t hold,” asks Welch in his tender, mysterious debut, a winner of the 2016 Iowa Poetry Prize. The props in question may be myth and memory, the book’s base elements, which Welch uses to tell new stories about intimacy and identity. Masculinity is a particular site of revision: the book begins with the loss of virginity rendered in Herculean terms—as a labor, even a slaughter, rather than a feat of bravura. Welch’s poems are about “skinny boys/ without a sense of butchery”—those for whom “honesty is a kind of/ solitude.” Such distance leaves his characters at the fringes of history, struggling to understand their place in it: “I don’t know/ how to collect each new// perspective,” Welch writes in the title poem, which opens with an astronaut’s description of the 9/11 attacks. But this remove also bestows vision, one that often makes the mundane life events the book recounts wonderfully unfamiliar. Welch sees snowballs as “brief comets/ smoldering// at my feet” and hears “Owls and their Michael Jackson/ hooting in the trees.” His work is at once cubist and confessional, aching and wry. Welch’s point-of-view, however eccentric, is an altogether welcome one.

Timothy Daniel Welch Wins Iowa Poetry Prize!

I'm very excited to announce that my lover and life partner is the winner of the 2016 Iowa Poetry Prize.

2016 Iowa Poetry Prize Announcement

The 2016 Iowa Poetry Prize is awarded to Adam Giannelli's Tremulous Hinge and Timothy Daniel Welch's Odd Bloom Seen from Space. This year's judge was Craig Morgan Teicher.

Teicher writes of Giannelli's Tremulous Hinge, "This extraordinary and sobering debut begins with a literal stutter--'Since I couldn't say tomorrow /  I said Wednesday.' In trade for this impediment, Adam Giannelli finds that, in poetry, what can't be said gives way to what must be said. Giannelli has found a new stopping place in his poems, tensed between mourning and tribute: he sees a beautiful waning world made beautiful by its fleetingness."
 
Adam Giannelli's poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, New England Review,  Ploughshares, Field, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is the translator of a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio, Diadem, and the editor of High Lonesome, a collection of essays on Charles Wright. A PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Utah, he lives in Salt Lake City.

Of Odd Bloom Seen from Space, Teicher says, "In these poems, Welch is an attentive watcher who has 'lived most of my life alone.' From the little distance he cultivates, he manages a detailed view of the big picture. This is classical poetry set in our time, with room for 'Owls and their Michael Jackson / hooting in the trees' and 'reading Anna Karenina / on a Kindle.' For all its subtle sarcasms, this is a deeply earnest book, one sensitive soul's reckoning with a troubled age."
 
Timothy Daniel Welch received his MFA in poetry from San Diego State University and his PhD in English from Florida State University, and was the 2013-2014 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow for the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Institute for Creative Writing. His poetry may be found in journals such as Rattle, Arts & Letters, Best New Poets, Green Mountains Review Online, and elsewhere. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.