Velvet

William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, The Offing, and elsewhere. He lives with himself in Towson, Maryland.

• AcknowledgmentsIHouse Made of GunsApologyThat Summer at SeasidePunch List, 1994GasolineA Silverfish in the ChildhoodOpen HouseAnkylosing Spondylitis as Conductor and BrakemanTracing the PainSonnet with Chronic IllnessRiverOde to KlonopinPeople as Seasons as PeopleAimArs PoeticaVoxWhen My Father Tells Me to Move on AlreadyArrowheadIIArkElegy with SteamElegy with My Great-Grandmother’s PianoLetterFirst PleaWaterlineSonnet with Bare BranchesFlare-UpFamily ReunionEkphrasis in Alberta, AlabamaElegy with a HurricaneVelvetWhen My Father Tells Me I Had a Great ChildhoodIIISonnet of Little FaithElegy on the WholeThe Morning of the Most Recent Shooting I SawAlabama, 2004Elegy with TeethWhen My AlabamaWhen the Cop Tells UsElegy with a Wavelength of SoundNotes on DepressionWhen My Brother Tells Me I’m Obsessed with SadnessSeaside MeditationOn Dishes and My FatherWhen My Friend Tells Me My Father Doesn’t Seem That BadAdmission with a Thousand Dead BirdsOn the Way to the ReadingOde to the Pillars of the Overpass BridgeOde to My Pectus ExcavatumNestingElegy for Another Late-Night Phone CallNotesThank Yous

“William Fargason’s poems glimmer with grit and tenderness. Largely focused on the speaker’s relationship with his father, Velvet not only reckons with the violence we’ve inherited; these poems imagine how we might emerge from the ashes of the past, to start again, to have a voice, despite the abuses of toxic masculinity and the struggles of mental and physical illness. With lyrical mastery, rich narratives, and heightened vulnerability, Velvet is an intense and moving second collection.” - Marianne Chan, author of All Heathens “In Velvet, Will Fargason masterfully writes toward and away from the intergenerational trauma the speaker of these poems is so familiar with--trauma carried in the body. The writing is sensory, musical, and full of a profound longing that avoids sentimentality or cliché. Fargason offers us a tender, self-reflective, vulnerable, and nuanced exploration of masculinity--critical and at once aware of its pervasive aspects at the personal and cultural levels.” - Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, author of 40 Weeks“At times, as in these lines from “That Summer at Seaside”, in which the speaker refers to towels the speaker laid out, in the midst of a mental health crisis, to absorb rain, William Fargason's voice rises to a great and surprising lyric intensity: “the damp towels crumpled across the floor / a field of sleeping newborns.” At other times, his voice is clear and direct--so bare one feels one ought not to be hearing what one is hearing. Always his poems are essential. Velvet is further evidence of a talent to be watched, to be read, to be heard.”- Shane McCrae, author of The Many Hundreds of the Scent