Creep Love

by Michael Walsh

Michael Walsh’s poetry collection Creep Love explores a family contending with a complex and ongoing crisis, the aftermath of which creates a shockwave that reverberates through these poems. Stories, half-truths, and lies combine into disturbing fable: A young pregnant woman flees her abusive boyfriend only to discover with terror that he is focused on her younger sister. When her younger sister later gives birth to her abusive ex’s other sons, the unsettling presence of the child’s father becomes unavoidable, and the family soon forces the first son to become a family secret.

We come to find out that the father carries a secret of his own. As tensions rise, attacks within the family escalate and finally culminate in an attempted murder. In Creep Love, Walsh captures the terror of this event, and these poems take us through the surprising outcomes. Near death, rather than floating into light due to hypoxia—a temporary release from the grip of compounding trauma—the speaker sinks into all-encompassing darkness. The anxiety of this moment returns him to his body from the edge of death. These poems give witness to the fallout, demonstrating how love can be charged with something ultimately unknowable.
 

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2021

About the author

Michael Walsh is an independent scholar, editor, poet and fiction writer. His full-length poetry collections include The Dirt Riddles (University of Arkansas Press) and Creep Love (Autumn House Press). He is also the author of two letterpress chapbooks: Adam Walking the Garden and Sleepwalks (both from Red Dragonfly Press). His short stories about rural gay life have appeared in journals such as Great River Review, North Dakota Quarterly and the anthology Fiction on a Stick (Milkweed Editions). In addition, he's the editor of the poetry anthology Queer Nature, forthcoming from Autumn House Press. He lives in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin.

Reviews

[Inverted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Creep Love is a proof of Michael Walsh’s persistent motifs, establishing a world where the pastoral and the familial overlap. A clear successor to Dirt Riddles, this book expands on rural life by way of bloodlines and its various complicated streams: a father that’s also an uncle, an aunt-stepmother, a cousin-sister. Family is a such a wretched and violent epicenter for Walsh that these poems demonstrate a disconnect from traditional notions of familial (and consequently, romantic) love. The poems are sites of dysfunction, with Walsh oscillating between sparse documentation and fantasy as short-term negotiations with his troubled past. These poems shift from jagged recollections of torture, to fawning or building alternate realities where he reconciles with his abusive father. Here, the wounds are still fresh and left open.

[Cheri Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the moment I heard the title of this book, and saw the awesomely weird cover, I knew there was a good chance I was going to like it. I was right. These are achingly moving poems, ringing like a clock with the aftershocks of violence and trauma and family secrets; but they're also often sultry, filled with the dirty romance of the barnyard and the natural world, as well as with repressed desire and the ways in which fulfilling it can go both right and wrong. From "My Life as Creep Boy": "I flunk out of school but graduate/ to the web. I'll trick you out of your clothes,/ beat you when you don't bend over,/ and if you dare tell, I'll deny everything."