There is a calm meditative grace to the poems in Will Walker’s Wednesday After Lunch. His is a narrative “in the American grain,” to use William Carlos Williams’ phrase. While some are quiet lyric poems of love of landscape and streetscape and quite human dogs, and some of a sweet domestic love, even asleep, a man and his wife “on your own side/of the bed/ split neatly into neighboring countries,” Walker’s work has that very American room for Khrushchev at the UN pounding his shoe, and rhinestones, and Monopoly, and Jack Ruby, and Marilyn Monroe. In a tour de force of a poem, he writes of a dream of a bonfire, a barbecue on the flats in Provincetown, everyone from his Edenic past reunited, and “even the ocean loves to gather by fire.” These are poems to warm yourself by. —Gail Mazur, author of Zeppo’s First Wife