LaWanda Walters

LaWanda Walters is the author of Light Is the Odalisque (from the Silver Concho Poetry Series by Press 53, editors Pamela Uschuk and William Pitt Root). LaWanda grew up in Mississippi and North Carolina. She earned her BA at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, an MA in Literature from California State University at Humboldt, and an MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Cincinnati Review, Cutthroat, The Georgia Review, The Laurel Review, North American Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, and Sou’wester. Her poem “Marilyn Monroe” appears in Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (Dartmouth College Press, 2014), and “Goodness in Mississippi” was chosen by Sherman Alexie for Best American Poetry 2015. She received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2020. She is the mother of two grown children and lives with her husband, John Drury, in Cincinnati.

SAMPLE POEM

HER ART

I’d like to cry on Elizabeth Bishop’s shoulder.
I lost my mother’s engagement ring, for one thing.
Not your fault, she’d say. So much seems to want
to be lost. Even if, one day, in anger or grief
you threw it across the room or placed it somewhere
safe, the fact is, now, it’s gone. Just read my poem. 

Remember? My mother’s watch was in that poem.
My losses are famous. Don’t cry on anyone’s shoulder—
even if I were available, I’m lost somewhere.
Find a nice shape and put your list of things
inside as you’d pack a valise. Be careful of your grief,
how you throw it around. People don’t want

a sight like that. Write about your want
as if it were an apple or a moth. A poem,
if you’re lucky, can help someone else’s grief.
It might be there to lean on like a shoulder,
though that should not be your intent. My things—
why should you care at all for them or where

or why I lost them? You saw me, somewhere,
painting Florida, transcribing my want,
that perilous view, into some other thing.
It is not a raft for you to climb on. The poem
might be about someone else’s shoulders,
how I miss them, perhaps, which is my grief,

not yours to worry over. Chart loss on a graph,
see how precisely rocks recall the wear
of tides and rain. Then think of those shoulders
you miss—pose them like a sculpture. The want
of arms made the Venus de Milo. A poem
is luck like that and discipline and things

you’ll never have again. See those things
as tiles in a watercolor tin. Grief,
set right, can flicker and stay, and then the poem
can stand in for your lost ring. I cannot say where
to look for any of this, or if the friend you want
will disappear. Step into loss as you should—

as you like to step in water, somewhere, your shoulders
cold until you’re swimming. My poem was a thing
I made, and it took some balancing, that grief and want.

~ ~ ~

Praise for Light Is the Odalisque

From the opening poem of LaWanda Walters' Light Is the Odalisque, one is caught in the hands of an expert story-teller, and held up by the singing of a poet. Some of the poems are formally beautiful, others gorgeously free, but all are clear-eyed, deep, sassy, sexy, compassionate and vibrantly alive. Reading this book is a pleasure I know I'll return to again and again. Its roots are Southern as wild honey and as surpassingly sweet. 

—Liz Rosenberg, author of The Moonlight Palace

For over three decades, LaWanda Walters’ poems have seen the light only in the pages of the country’s most prestigious literary journals; this is her first book. Whatever the reasons a brilliant writer’s work fails to find a publisher, it is an occasion for excitement (and much astonishment) when it does. The poems I read for years in magazines come full into their glory when set in their rightful context. This is mature, eye-opening work, meticulous and exhilarating, that only a writer at the height of her powers can give us.

—James Cummins, author of Still Some Cake

This wide-ranging, beautiful, and painful book reveals LaWanda Walters as a masterful, brave, and dangerous poet. As much at home with a disciplined free verse as with traditional forms, and as comfortable with narrative as with lyric, Walters delivers (like the morning mail, like a baby) a world. The odalisque is light—meaning not heavy, meaning luminous. “How odd,” we discover, “that a direction—like South—takes on meaning like a person’s face.”  The poems are (or appear to be) autobiographical in the best sense. “I searched myself,” Heraclitus declared, and Walters’s book, written in that spirit, stokes the Heraclitean fire with embers from a burning heart.

—T.R. Hummer, author of Skandalon: Poems