Michael Walsh’s poetry collection Creep Love explores a family contending with a complex and ongoing crisis, the aftermath of which creates a shockwave that reverberates through these poems. Stories, half-truths, and lies combine into disturbing fable: A young pregnant woman flees her abusive boyfriend only to discover with terror that he is focused on her younger sister. When her younger sister later gives birth to her abusive ex’s other sons, the unsettling presence of the child’s father becomes unavoidable, and the family soon forces the first son to become a family secret.

We come to find out that the father carries a secret of his own. As tensions rise, attacks within the family escalate and finally culminate in an attempted murder. In Creep Love, Walsh captures the terror of this event, and these poems take us through the surprising outcomes. Near death, rather than floating into light due to hypoxia—a temporary release from the grip of compounding trauma—the speaker sinks into all-encompassing darkness. The anxiety of this moment returns him to his body from the edge of death. These poems give witness to the fallout, demonstrating how love can be charged with something ultimately unknowable.
 

Michael Walsh grew up on a dairy farm in western Minnesota and came out of the closet in his small-town newspaper in 1992. His poetry books include The Dirt Riddles as well as two chapbooks, Adam Walking the Garden and Sleepwalks. With James Crews, he is coeditor of Queer Nature, a poetry anthology also forthcoming from Autumn House Press. His poems and stories have appeared in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, the Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Great River Review, The Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner. He lives in Minneapolis, MN, and works as a curriculum administrator at the University of Minnesota.