{"product_id":"unsettled-accounts-1","title":"Unsettled Accounts","description":"\u003cp\u003eTo take the mess of life and make meaning from it is what all poets seek to do. For \u003cb\u003eWill Wells\u003c\/b\u003e, recipient of the thirteenth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, this includes reaching across centuries and continents, into the minds and hearts of disparate individuals—Albert Einstein, Andrea Yates, the traveler from Porlock, Dante, or Holocaust survivors, including his own grandmother—to extract the personal value embedded there for him.\u003cbr\u003e By turns funny, shocking, gentle, and musing, the poems of Unsettled Accounts reflect \u003cb\u003eWill Wells\u003c\/b\u003e's constant attention to his environment and to his past—and to our environment and our past—and his persistent effort to keep them real and whole by turning them into art.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003ePing-Pong with the Nazis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Bored couriers have kicked off boots and set\u003cbr\u003e their pipes aside, a Dutch interior.\u003cbr\u003e The slapped ball clacks over the table\u003cbr\u003e like a telegraphic code, then trickles\u003cbr\u003e like faint hope across the marble floor.\u003cbr\u003e How quickly he bends to retrieve it\u003cbr\u003e and puts it back in play, the Jewish boy\u003cbr\u003e living with false papers in a villa\u003cbr\u003e owned by his mother's Gentile friends, and now\u003cbr\u003e commandeered by retreating Germans\u003cbr\u003e as divisional headquarters. The young\u003cbr\u003e blond soldiers, deferential to a social\u003cbr\u003e better, muss his blond locks like the kid\u003cbr\u003e brothers back in the fatherland, like big\u003cbr\u003e brothers steeped in genial menace.\u003cbr\u003e He begs another game, so they relent.\u003cbr\u003e As the ball resumes its chatter across\u003cbr\u003e the no-man's-land strung with a net,\u003cbr\u003e he calculates the risk that each shot brings.\u003cbr\u003e And so do they. He holds his pee and serves.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ohio University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54240543834456,"sku":"9780821419038","price":29.99,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780821419038_63bf208d-01ea-4953-bee8-3fad41285d18.jpg?v=1778576466","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/unsettled-accounts-1","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}