Broadstone Author's Event: Robert Walicki and David Swerdlow
About this Event
We are grateful to host two phenomenal Pittsburgh poets, Robert Walicki and David Swerdlow, at The Whale for a Broadst ine Author's Event in celebraation of their respective new collections American Crush and Watershed (Walicki), Empty the River and Nightstand (Swerdlow). The evening will feature readings by both poets followed by a book signing.
American Crush by Robert Walicki
"The language in Robert Walicki's American Crush is urgent, exhausted, and alive. These poems know what it costs to drive a jackhammer, fall from a ladder, to love someone through a grinding life, or watch a father burn out like a furnace. Written in the great tradition of Levine and Carver but with a voice unmistakably his own, Walicki finds the sacred in trench line and steel ash, in a baseball mitt stiff as a dead hand, in a grandmother watching the NBA from her hospital bed. This is American working-class lyric at its finest: unsparing, tender, and true." -Dion O'Reilly, author of Limerence
"Visceral and gritty, weaving lyrical threads through rich narrative pieces, Bob Walicki's American Crush is a heart-rending ride. From blue collar work to sports, health, and life in Western Pennsylvania, Walicki's poems are deeply embodied through place, time, and memory. This wonderful collection pulls you in and reminds you, "Still, there is rapture here, in these watery hills, bluer than memory." -Cameron Barnett, author of Murmur and The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water
Watershed by Robert Walicki
At least since David Ignatow’s injunction to “Get the gasworks in a poem” there have been poets answering the call to tell the truth of working-class life. Robert Walicki is an especially apt practitioner, writing out of first-hand experience while wielding the tools of language. In the title poem of his new collection Watershed, his neighbor “speaks the language of plumber,” and the guiding metaphor throughout is the flow of water, replete with mud and rust and freezing rain. “I didn’t know this was all about structure, about surety, / about everything we gave our bodies to except for what mattered.” Here he shows what matters, and how “Grief can overtake you but grief isn’t you.” Writing for those “more Miller than IPA” he declares “I have nothing to offer / but daylight on a chipped window ledge” – and it’s more than enough.
Empty the River by David Swerdlow
Of all the literary works to emerge in response to the pandemic years, few are as harrowing as David Swerdlow’s Empty the River. Bosch-like in its surreal intensity and excruciating details, this collection of poems presents the hellscape of societal collapse in “a city on the river … besieged by illness,” narrated by survivors who might envy the dead. A father’s cry is swallowed by a blank page. City leaders “scratch / by memory our names / in the walls in case we do not / remember them at the times / of our deaths.” “I worked for the city,” says the man who plowed under and tallied the dead, those around him “keeping our distance in case / he carries something from the past.” Empty the River joins the ranks of great apocalyptic literature from Camus’ The Plague to Rebecca Gayle Howell’s American Purgatory as works that force us to confront the nightmares of our past and present in order to make possible the dream of a better future.
Nightstand by David Swerdlow
David Swerdlow opens his poetry collection Nightstand with fear for his Latina wife, for the possibility that someone “will do her some unspeakable / harm because we live in the renewed world / of hatred” – a “hard / world we never wanted to imagine.” But that is the world, and Swerdlow does not flinch from describing it. From such a beginning this could have been a grim undertaking, but instead this is a book of love, and of hope. His title poem describes the contents of his bedside table, “all the things I cannot part with,” which is also an apt description of this collection, a eclectic mix of memories (including the remarkable story of a relative who was Lenin’s “right hand man in the revolution,” adding to his complicated family legacy). In the end, for all the crushing weight of history, he takes heart from the “beautiful ghosts” of his daughters, through whom he is “planning to outlive / myself.” Appropriately he closes with a love poem, in a garden “already gone / to weeds,” awaiting the coming of night: “I should love to know / how a day finally ends.”
ROBERT WALICKI is a two-time Pushcart and Best of The Net nominee. His work has been published in a number of journals, including The Kentucky Review, ChIron Review and others his recent collection, Watershed, was just published by Broadstone Books and his most recent collection, American Crush was just published by Luchador Press.
DAVID SWERDLOW is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, including Empty the River (2025) and Nightstand (2023) from Broadstone Books. His work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, West Branch and many other distinguished journals and anthologies. A recent nominee for a Pushcart Prize, Swerdlow is the recipient of several awards, including two grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poetry with a Jewish Theme. He served as a Director of the James Wright Poetry Festival, a Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Peru, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and as visiting faculty on two Semester at Sea voyages. Since 1990, he has taught literature and creative writing at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
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