Caw

In passionate poems about sin, obsession, and mortality – an artist’s infatuation with a doll, an interspecies relationship, an ex-lover whose presence lingers in recipes, ecclesiastical birds, and a sex toy holding a loved one’s ashes – Waters delivers impeccably crafted narratives suffused with his signature lyrical gestures. At the book’s core is a sequence of twenty-five poems on aging, dementia, and caregiving, chiseled phrase by phrase toward unflinching and memorable closure. Caw is a brilliant, intimate, and moving addition to Waters’ body of work and may be his most powerful collection yet. 
 Praise for Michael Waters
 - The Dean of Discipline (2018) 
“[H]e tempers in his latest collection a delight in wit and wordplay with a rigorous prosodic training honed and refined throughout a long and distinguished career… A voluptuary of style… Michael Waters is the ablest poet of an able generation.” – Floyd Collins, The Gettysburg Review
 The Dean of Discipline’s absorbing subject is the making of art, showing and teaching us a poet’s meticulous and raucous devotion so that we gain a sound and sense of how poems are, in fact, created… Waters’s work assumes a divine erotic presence even in his most harrowing poems. – Judith Vollmer, The Georgia Review
 Celestial Joyride (2016) 
“[T]he consistency of his work over the past thirty years has contributed greatly to American letters, and his unique voice within the poetry world illuminates, with precision and clarity, the intricate nature of the human condition.”– Esteban Rodríguez, American Book Review
 “Waters stands among the best American poets writing today.” – Roberto Bonazzi, San Antonio Express-News