The Things We Do to Protect Our Own

Alabama Beat Poet Laureate (2024-2026) Jeff Weddle delivers a collection of bone-deep work aimed straight at the American Zeitgeist. The work is by turns tender, fierce, political and personal. These are poems only Weddle could write and they are exactly what we need right now.

Jeff Weddle is an essential poet for our times, probing into the heart and bone of what it means to be human, swimming through the lifeblood and marrow of the modern world, revealing meaning and exposing what is most important. As Jean Cocteau famously said, The poet doesn't invent. He listens. And Weddle listens with a keener ear than most. He is a fine writer in the Beat tradition and so much more. I cannot recommend his work highly enough.

In The Things We Do to Protect Our Own, Jeff Weddle knows us by our terrible thirst and looks for us, and himself, and everyone and everything by sifting through a billion billion lost possibilities. In his hands, time moves in and out from the quantum to the sensory to the fractured past and the imagined future, all while parts of his speakers and those spoken to disappear from themselves, from the Earth, and from language, which itself disappears. This is the world of Ken and Barbie posed in a lewd position next to a Gideon Bible, stand-ins for Adam and Eve, ambassadors of a debased religion, but it's also a world in which every star / is an invitation to eternity, that is, one in which wonder still exists, even if it's inaccessible to us. This is the world of hard problems in a strange country, one growing stranger by the day as we participate in its undoing by shuffling our hours like a deck of dimity convictions. What is the responsibility of the poet in this scathed new world? How do we relate to, remember, and carry on the work of poets who've come before while being good parents to our children, good partners to those we love, and continuing to be good children and grandchildren as our family trees grow downward and the upper limbs die off? We are the greatest question, Weddle writes. No sugar with that, no cream. / No answers. Maybe no answers but the right questions, the right seeing, and the right poems for where we're going and however it all ends. That's what this penetrating collection offers.
-Dana Henry Martin

Jeff Weddle's poetry resembles fragments of life; it carries the simplicity of light that rises from within and collides with the shadows of memory and meditation. The language is that of everyday life, often ironic, full of concern and love, able to modernize myths, to see loss with humor, and the wound with the tenderness of a nurse's fingers and her seriousness. Weariness becomes beautiful, filled with nostalgia, yet transcended through a love for life. His poetry is the testimony. It preserves tradition, but by being intimate it is uniquely his own, with the ability to also become the reader's.
-Visar Zhiti, writer and poet

Jeff Weddle has been to places familiar to us and found a warp and weft there and fired up illumination. He's met with damaged angels, granted absolutions, and railed against every rent in the human cloth. His middle path is made of gravel. It gives the right traction to the soul.
-Nina Kamberos, publisher, Laertes, a Press for Literary Translation