A Book of Saturdays

Advance Praise for A Book of Saturdays:

A Book of Saturdays begins with an accident where a distracted driver hits and seriously injures aboy on a bike. This catastrophic error creates an undertow of regret and loss whose deep hums and aftershocks bring nightmares to the driver, and a desire to turn back time. Each stunning poem comes as a package of six parts—six, the sum of points on a snowflake and the place of Saturday in a week. Each stanza is a shard of light, illuminating the complex experience of being human, particularly for those conscience-bound humans who unintentionally harm another, then exist in the aftermath of dislocation, where the world of the known past unravels while another is constructed by grief. So well-crafted and spare are these deeply felt poems. “We fear our weakness,” this wise poet writes, “yet so much comes to us from our trembling.”

—Tina Carlson, author of A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, winner of the 2024 NM/AZ prize for poetry.

Dale Wisely’s A Book of Saturdays tells a heartbreaking story of innocence, guilt, and moral responsibility through a sinuous sequence of interrelated poems. It’s written with the empathy and eloquence one has come to expect from Wisely, whose contributions to the literature of the indie press as publisher, editor, and poet are legion. His new book is a stark examination of human fragility under inhuman pressure and a brilliant example of the power of poetry to tell psychological truths at full amplitude.

—Howie Good, author of True Crimes

I wish I had written Dale Wisely’s A Book of Saturdays. It’s got everything I find irresistible in literature: love, heartbreak, enigma, danger and beautiful sentences. Dale has a fiction writer’s chops and a poet’s heart. This little book is a sweet gospel for our wounded world, clear-eyed but compassionate.

—Corey Mesler, author of Memphis Movie Two: The Recrudescence of Eric Warberg