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 NazisBored couriers have kicked off boots and settheir pipes aside, a Dutch interior.The slapped ball clacks over the tablelike a telegraphic code, then trickleslike faint hope across the marble floor.How quickly he bends to retrieve itand puts it back in play, the Jewish boyliving with false papers in a villaowned by his mother's Gentile friends, and nowcommandeered by retreating Germansas divisional headquarters. The youngblond soldiers, deferential to a socialbetter, muss his blond locks like the kidbrothers back in the fatherland, like bigbrothers steeped in genial menace.He begs another game, so they relent.As the ball resumes its chatter acrossthe 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.