The Book of Echoes is a tour de force of the internal voice, one that's sent out into the world and comes back in myriad waves, demonstrating the complicated, beautiful, and varied nature of the human mind. Taking on the voice of Robert Creeley, David Gregory Welch asks: "these / days what isn't / a religion?" and these poems answer that question time and time again: what we might seek from the outside world can also be found within the striations of the self, "a heart / full of wet sand // beating beside the ocean.

-Adam Clay, author of Circle Back

The Book of Echoes is a song not easily sung. "I'm alive and live in my failure to live," David Gregory Welch writes, the imperative clanging against his deft and lyrical restraint. Through captivating accounts of Tourette syndrome, Welch's language mirrors repeated movements and sounds, embodying Auden's vision of poetry as "a way of happening, a mouth." "Look," he writes, "I cannot move the way you hope I do, a blanket / in the breeze of its own control". David Gregory Welch's poems celebrate and transform the body's limits in this intoxicating, unforgettable collection.

-Jenny Molberg, The Court of No Record

Echoes are born of depth and dimension, in cavernous, resonant, and hard spaces. The Book of Echoes makes that kind of space: deep and expansive, rich and complex. Within it, David Gregory Welch's surreal poems ricochet and careen. They startle and rivet. Biting in its politics, singular in its observations, heartfelt in its confessions, his is a voice that resonates and lingers so that long after the reading is done, the poems remain and remain and remain.

-Jaswinder Bolina, English as a Second Language

Publisher: Jackleg Press

Pub date: 2025-06-16

Length: 102 pages