Virginia

About the Book

In this music-laced poem cycle Daniel Weeks chronicles an against-the-odds romance between a middle-aged widower and an elusive younger woman. The farmer John Coleman must come to terms with communal opposition as well as his own sense of fidelity to the memory of his beloved wife. A larger web of private passion and public intolerance radiates from this core story as Weeks limns the workings of his rural society. What in other hands could have turned melodramatic here maintains the dignity of reserve and understatement. The poet’s love song, affective and sobering, weaves its way close to the ground.

James Fowler
Editor
SLANT: A Journal of Poetry

Daniel Weeks’s poetry transmutes objects, things, into magic. Just as the currents and the salt of the ocean transmute plain glass into seaglass (an almost living thing), Daniel shapes words into magic, a magic based on reality, a magic that through the miracle of art turns simple words into passion. His words brighten us. There is a deep sweetness in Virginia, and a deep human drama. Praise!

Emanuel di Pasquale
Author of Genesis

About the Author

Daniel J. Weeks’s published collections of poems include X Poems (Blast Press, 1990), Ancestral Songs (Libra Publishers, Inc., 1992), Indignities (Mellen Poetry Press, 1999), and Characters (Blast Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in The Cimarron Review, The Roanoke Review Mudfish, Fox Cry, Zone 3, SLANT, Voices International, Fennel Stalk, Mobius, The Sulphur River Poetry Review, The Tucumcari Review, and many other publications. Weeks lives in Eatontown, N.J., with his wife, Jackie, and their two children, Jared and Rachel.