Walking Papers

A decade's worth of poems by one of our most reliable witnesses, National Book Award finalist Thomas Lynch.

In his fourth collection of poems, Thomas Lynch attends to flora, fauna, and fellow pilgrims: dead poets and living masters, a former president and his factotums, a sin-eater and inseminator. Faux-bardic and mock-epic, deft at lament and lampoon, fete and feint, Lynch's poems are powerful medicines, tonics for the long haul and home-going.

from "Walking Papers"
     You can think of it as punctuation
     and maybe take some comfort from that, friend—
     a question mark or exclamation point—
     no matter, we're all sentenced to an end,
     the movers and the shakers, bon vivants,
     all ne'er-do-wells and nincompoops, savants,
     sage and sluggard, deft and daft alike:
     everyone's given their walking papers.