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Composting: Reflections on Trees, Tools, and Time
Paperback
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Published: Jul 10 2026
Pages: 88
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.18 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Let your lips be stained / with truth, your whitest shirt be ruined exhorts the speaker of a poem in Mid Walsh's Composting. To engage with these trenchant poems, which articulate the concrete work of repair and renewal, the abstract work of forgiveness and self-evaluation, is to face the heat of a furnace at the heart / that burns and sighs and knows no reward / other than to be a flame. The poems manifest what healing grace can emerge from hands, callused or smeared with dirt and grease, as they ply oars to bridle the current or adjust a deadman to fasten down the worktable upheavals of the world.
-Tom Daley, author, Far Cry
These poems are dialogues of doing and being, intense labor and quiet witness, and pleasure in connection and solitude. Care in every activity - pounding with a sledge hammer, raking leaves, walking a forest path - is celebrated in poems of consummate craftsmanship for shifting tones, musical lines, and fresh images. Using poetic tools as varied as these, Walsh, himself a carpenter, can draw from his toolbox. The poems in Composting heighten our awareness and appreciation of, as Walsh writes, the kiss of living, even when living sprout[s] strange fears and loss.
-Merryn Rutledge, EdD, author, Sweet Juice and Ruby-Bitter Seed
Mid Walsh's Composting is a book that turns the work of living into revelation. Like Frost walking along stone walls, Walsh tends the suburbs, backwoods, and shoreline with exacting, ecological ache and reverent attention. His poems remind us that whatever is, was other first, and that the ordinary labor of hauling broken ties and weeds away / into the woods, or feeling the weight of what's fallen pull the body backward, leads us into a deeper reckoning of repair and grace. This transformative debut book of poems shows how tending the world teaches us to tend ourselves.
-Ed Gaudet, hi-tech entrepreneur and published poet
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