How It Went to Pieces

"In How It Went to Pieces, Jeff Weddle, author of 13 previous books, casts his succinct, side wise glance at old age, love, children, dogs and cats cannibals and death. Weddle, both pragmatist and optimist, moves his poems easily from poverty to abundance with wry sketches, and intimate vignettes. The dreamy quality of living weaves through these poems which never forget life's inevitable end. In the suite of short poems that close the book, Weddle considers his own "Requium." When I die bury me in a lost motel..../After all, I was just a dream. How It Went to Pieces is a dream, you want to have."

-Wendy Taylor Carlisle, the author of four books and five chapbooks and the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for her fourth book, The Mercy of Traffic.

"Weddle's poems are immediately and refreshingly engaging, possessing a clear and honest music that pulls you along. Many of the pieces here have a sense of hard-won peace about them, others share a longing for people and an America that no longer exist. The mood is occasionally mournful but never too far away from the possibility of joy. This is a poetry of these times, exploring and celebrating our humanity in a manner much needed. "

-William Taylor, Jr., Pretty Things to Say (Six Ft.Swells Press, 2020)

"Reading, How It Went To Pieces, is like finding a stranger's old photo album. There are images you vaguely recognize and relate to but make you feel what might have been. Poems that take you to the wrong town where you find "broken roads leading to nowhere, beer drunk days, beautiful lies, a quarter moon flirting, stray moments that might have meant love" and only the ghosts of moments gone by. Jeff Weddle's poet-ry creates clear and unfiltered scenes that make you believe you were there. Which is what good poetry does."

-Todd Cirillo, author of Kisses From a Straight Razor

"Jeff Weddle is a brilliant poet unmatched in elegance of craft and soul-steeped insight. His intelligent, sharply observant verses move with graceful eloquence across the pages of this book. Weddle's poems build intricate bridges between mundane and more illuminated planes of consciousness, and travel unflinchingly through the darker corners, as well. They wander through warm memories held close, brave the cruel gray of loss and heartbreak, and cozy up for coffee and conversation with ghosts, cats, and cherished loved ones encountered through time. Together they sing elegies for the ailing human spirit and emerge with pebbles of hope, sometimes entire mountains: "Somewhere there is a spark and somehow you keep it burning." - from "Sometimes It Hurts." How It Went To Pieces challenges perception, calls out many of today's bitter injustices, triumphs in the strength of the human heart, and tends to psychic wounds too familiar to us all. It celebrates and soothes the timeless, uncompromising soul, ever following pathways made of stars-"Coins on eyes don't fool anyone. I'm wide awake inside the inside."- from "A Dream Within a Dream." This collection is a rare treasure, entirely real."

-Tanya Rakh, poet and author at Posthuman

Poetry & Prose