The Conscience of My Other Being

Through the combination of our imagined and real lives, the inner self thrives and searches out who we are and who we wish to be. In William Walsh's poems, reality and the imagined life become one to create a duality of existence: a world unfolding in tragedy, pain, humor, and optimism, where the narrator glides through life with spectacular clarity. Narrative in nature, the poems in The Conscience of My Other Being, operate through momentum as the narrator wakes up in jail, stops for a rattlesnake in the road, remembers a childhood romance, buries his dog, and longingly excavates his past to find meaning in the current life. The aching conscience wandering through the ordinary life reflects everything we recognize in the fractured experience of contemporary Ameica, in language that is playful and profound, evoking a landscape we have never seen, but instantly recognize.