David Walker
Writer, Teacher, Editor
Golden Walkman Magazine
Latest Issue
Audio Samples
Other Praise for Pause...
Sample Poem
Pause: A Collection of Moment Poems
David Walker’s Pause zooms in on those small everyday moments that generally escape us: a glimpse of a woman driving the other way, the instant before pulling the cord of the lawnmower, the drifting of thoughts while lifting weights . . . These poems are attentive to the fine details of their moments, and to their significance—a Christmas, for example, after the parents split, with those remaining “sitting on faraway couches passing / brightly colored bags with flimsy tissue.” Pause is a wonderful first collection.
- Jeff Mock
These poems are written by a mind on the road. They find small moments of illumination while traveling alone, like headlights that catch some unexpected image in the dark. The images can be roadkill, or they can be something more hopeful: a lover’s flip-flop, a brother’s cap. Throughout, there’s a sense of humorous musing, making Pause eminently readable and thoroughly enjoyable.
- J.D. Scrimgeour
David Walker’s moving first chapbook is a portrait of the everyday, crafted with precise images that stun the reader with their remarkable turns. These quiet poems ask hard questions about life. What exists beyond the everyday? What happens when our routine is broken—by divorce or death or memory or our own imagining? What can be crafted from an ordinary life? What is the value of what we craft? In one poem, the speaker notes, “I dig harder, trying to forget how little this all means.” Yet the mere digging indicates it means a great deal.
- Leah Nielsen
Merge
Coming off
the highway, two lanes converge before
the tolls. I, traveling
home from the auto shop three exits
north, meet eyes with
the woman exiting southbound
to ride that cantaloupe-
halve-shaped off-ramp.
She is swept in an inertia
that nestles her between
me and the red Jeep with the scuffed
chrome fender.
Who’s
to say she exists outside of the moment
I lose her in my rearview
mirror? Like
buckshot we speed off to find
home in different
parts of the carcass.