{"product_id":"unsettled-accounts-2","title":"Unsettled Accounts","description":"\u003cp\u003eTo take the mess of life and make meaning from it is what all poets seek to do. For \u003cb\u003eWill Wells\u003c\/b\u003e, recipient of the thirteenth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, this includes reaching across centuries and continents, into the minds and hearts of disparate individuals—Albert Einstein, Andrea Yates, the traveler from Porlock, Dante, or Holocaust survivors, including his own grandmother—to extract the personal value embedded there for him.\u003cbr\u003e\nBy turns funny, shocking, gentle, and musing, the poems of Unsettled Accounts reflect \u003cb\u003eWill Wells\u003c\/b\u003e’s constant attention to his environment and to his past—and to our environment and our past—and his persistent effort to keep them real and whole by turning them into art.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePing-Pong with the Nazis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\nBored couriers have kicked off boots and set\u003cbr\u003e\ntheir pipes aside, a Dutch interior.\u003cbr\u003e\nThe slapped ball clacks over the table\u003cbr\u003e\nlike a telegraphic code, then trickles\u003cbr\u003e\nlike faint hope across the marble floor.\u003cbr\u003e\nHow quickly he bends to retrieve it\u003cbr\u003e\nand puts it back in play, the Jewish boy\u003cbr\u003e\nliving with false papers in a villa\u003cbr\u003e\nowned by his mother’s Gentile friends, and now\u003cbr\u003e\ncommandeered by retreating Germans\u003cbr\u003e\nas divisional headquarters. The young\u003cbr\u003e\nblond soldiers, deferential to a social\u003cbr\u003e\nbetter, muss his blond locks like the kid\u003cbr\u003e\nbrothers back in the fatherland, like big\u003cbr\u003e\nbrothers steeped in genial menace.\u003cbr\u003e\nHe begs another game, so they relent.\u003cbr\u003e\nAs the ball resumes its chatter across\u003cbr\u003e\nthe no-man’s-land strung with a net,\u003cbr\u003e\nhe calculates the risk that each shot brings.\u003cbr\u003e\nAnd so do they. He holds his pee and serves.\u003c\/p\u003e\n","brand":"Will Wells","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43573266088118,"sku":"9780821443064","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0251\/4980\/0541\/files\/9780821443064_c9abde7d-a510-4d7c-976e-eb371a010da0.jpg?v=1727083545","url":"https:\/\/combined-academic.myshopify.com\/products\/unsettled-accounts-2","provider":"Combined Academic Publishers - Mare Nostrum Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}