Unsettled Accounts

To take the mess of life and make meaning from it is what all poets seek to do. For Will Wells , 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. By turns funny, shocking, gentle, and musing, the poems of Unsettled Accounts reflect Will Wells ’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. Ping-Pong with the Nazis Bored couriers have kicked off boots and set their pipes aside, a Dutch interior. The slapped ball clacks over the table like a telegraphic code, then trickles like faint hope across the marble floor. How quickly he bends to retrieve it and puts it back in play, the Jewish boy living with false papers in a villa owned by his mother’s Gentile friends, and now commandeered by retreating Germans as divisional headquarters. The young blond soldiers, deferential to a social better, muss his blond locks like the kid brothers back in the fatherland, like big brothers steeped in genial menace. He begs another game, so they relent. As the ball resumes its chatter across the no-man’s-land strung with a net, he calculates the risk that each shot brings. And so do they. He holds his pee and serves.