Iridescent Pigeons

Candace Walsh's poems in Iridescent Pigeons, her debut poetry chapbook, serve as a restoration project by articulating the everyday unsaid of love, not just in romantic contexts, but as a friend, sister, daughter, dog parent, wildflower admirer, and mother. Amid free verse, Candace's use of archaic poetic forms (the Sapphic stanza, ode, curtal sonnet, and cento) and homages to Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, and Gerard Manley Hopkins claims literary legacies that have historically excluded women and queer writers. This wry celebration of good, bad, ugly, thirsty, reverent, compassionate, unrequited, and fully granted love rouses new lexicons of connection and belonging. As poet J. Allyn Rosser observes of Candace, "Her poems-intensely, warily-celebrate familial, platonic, and romantic bonds, even as they ponder vestiges of the trauma love can leave behind." Candace is a queer poet, fiction writer, and essayist with Cuban and Greek ancestry and New York and New Mexico roots. She currently calls pastoral southeast Ohio home, where she lives in an old farmhouse with her wife, their two dogs, hundreds of books, and every kitchen and camping gadget you didn't know you needed (most recent addition: cherry pitter). Iridescent Pigeons is for the black sheep, the eldest daughters, the overly ardent friends, the dissociated, the dispossessed, the ones surprised by love, and the eschewers of received wisdom. The unashamed divorcées, the lost cousins, the off-season travelers, and the cockamamie schemers. The late-in-life lesbians, those called "precocious" and "old souls" as children, the truth-blurters, and the ruminators. The Heathers with two mommies and the exvangelical pantheists, the brash empaths, and the shy extroverts. The family archivists, the stationery collectors, and the forgetful overcommitters. The underestimated and the overcompensators, and all those hungry for the everyday unsaid.