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Boy Drinkers

"Here is a new look at the Irish diaspora, where the sound of glasses clinking is as familiar as the smell of incense at a Catholic Mass. Boy Drinkers looks with sober eyes at the people, tragedies, and traditions that shaped any of us who grew up in a community where alcohol and God were equally able to bring us to our knees. With his musician’s ear and Irishman’s humor, Winch pokes fun at the Holy, makes sacred the mundane, and redefines the meaning of 'grace.' "
--- Meg Kearney

"Terry Winch writes the kind of poems that make you want to kick back and listen and say to hell with what you were supposed to be doing. These vignettes of growing up Irish Catholic in New York City during the '50s and '60s evoke a world that seems long gone, in many ways with good reason. In a voice that manages to be understated, precise, and casual all at once, Winch exposes us to a set of characters struggling with a world that's changing too fast not only for them, but for anyone. These are poems you'll remember. Clear-eyed, unsentimental, and hilarious, they'll also break your heart."
--- Mark Wallace

The Drift of Things

"The Drift of Things jumps with linguistic life, its mixed marriage of anecdote and epiphany full of surprises. Winch's serio-comic imagination renews the world with panache, letting ordinary matters take on a glow at once enigmatic and everyday. In this technically impressive collection, the poems offer a witty, intrepid, unsentimental response to pleasures of the flesh as well as to pain and soreness of spirit... Winch has a beautifully tuned ear, whether working in formal mode or in supple lines of free verse. In all their zany, plainspoken ways, these poems sing."
--- Eamon Grennan

"I wish I lived in the world Terence Winch inhabits. Something invisible and mythical ennobles every object he encounters. His poems are full of a carefree confidence that comes from being so good at what you do that you don’t think twice about mixing elegies, villanelles, jokes, traditional rhymes…. Reading them is like traveling to an archaic but nearby realm, something like French-speaking Canada, but much, much funnier." --- Matthew Rohrer

"If there were a DC school of poetry, Terence Winch would be its Frank O'Hara. The music, humor, flat-out declarative, highly nuanced formal tone of TW—too full of love to be ironic—is propelled in light/dark metacognitive play by an urgent desire of the mind. Winch writes, 'Our inconceivable appointment with happiness is funny, not stupid./ It made the ancients famous and gave you perfect pitch./ It has given the nihilists nothing to worry about.' Fun, intense, and more than anyone—but Terence Winch—can say." --- Joan Retallack

"'In this world we are mystified by experience,' writes Terry Winch in his latest book, The Drift of Things, and in this tough and funny collection of poems, the world comes on as baffling and reassuring at once, as the poet weaves past and future predicaments together to make a more active present. Winch alternates old-school form and linguistic legerdemain, not like a professional at all, but better---like a poet who recognizes that 'professionalism' actually downgrades poetry to the misery of a job. The Drift of Things is a curative for the malaise of full-time employment; a copy should be posted in every train car of the Metro system." ---review by Buck Downs in The Washington Review
(see GeoffreyYoung.com or Small Press Distribution)

The Great Indoors

"Whew! There is something about Winch's poetry that leaves you breathless. Perhaps it's the grand, imagistic leaps: 'quiets as brides/skirting along on sheets of ice.' Brides? Ice? The fusion, the yoking, of such unlikely visions is one of Winch's great strengths. Following his poems in their majestic, airy ballet is thrilling because he's working at the edge of sense, tossing off similes and metaphors in an apparent recklessness that nevertheless seems perfectly controlled. ...Winch, author of the well-received Irish Musicians/American Friends (1985), writes with clear authority and great style and remains a poet to watch." -- Patricia Monaghan, Booklist, 12/15/94

"A collection of alternately witty, mysterious, tender, and harrowing narratives.... Winch specializes in a flat diction that imparts a reportorial, measured reasonableness to even the most brutal accounts. He calmly sets things out, moves in for the kill, and leaves you gasping, [yet]...there's tenderness lurking not too far below the surface. ...Winch's acute power of observation, combined with his vacillations between passion/dispassion and faith/cynicism, paint a warts-and-all portrait of how human beings struggle to face the day, battle with each other, and steal small pieces of transcendence from mundane routines. ...The poems come back to haunt you." ---Peter Bushyeager, The Poetry Project Newsletter

" 'I felt an intense craving for simplicity’ writes Terence Winch in his poem 'In the Milky Light.' That craving has been more than fulfilled in this wonderful new collection. It turns out that intensity and simplicity add up to something that is more than the sum of their parts, something very much like being awake and alive in this particular moment, in one’s skin, in one’s clothes." --- John Ashbery

"My selection for the 1996 Columbia Book Award is The Great Indoors by Terence Winch. I admire its atmosphere of the bitter-sweet, the expert sense of line, and its many subtle and humorous ways of Washington, D.C. I have lived in Washington and Winch understands the drift of those unenclosed by political boundaries, of the way day passes into night in that city. He has caught the essence of many moods, without exploiting them." ---Barbara Guest

"Terence Winch's poems ... resonate with an indelibly intimate narrative music that's as irresistible as the unassuming logic and equanimity that propel them ... It's as if you're suddenly listening to the only guy in the neighborhood talking any sense ... Sexy, goofy, lyrical, and astute, it's writing that gets the job done with incredible pleasure to spare." --- Ed Friedman, Director, St. Mark's Poetry Project, NYC

"Terence Winch is a cryptic urban romantic. His poems skid and glide in and out of focus, emptying out with a wry, postmodern whoosh and then being filled back up again, slowly, with a little dose of glittering liquid, like a glass subject to the ministrations of a devoted bartender." --- Amy Gerstler
(see Amazon)

Irish Musicians/American Friends

"Beautiful, simple, often heartbreaking poems about the big-city Irish. Winch...undeniably has the gift -- a blend of the two Jameses, Joyce and Farrell." -- Book World, The Washington Post

"The poems in Irish Musicians/American Friends ...could be called talking blues, sung in an Irish American tempo. There is a specific Irish American music in the voice...that has to be heard to be believed. The writing of Terence Winch will be a great discovery.---Denise O'Meara, New York Irish History Journal

"The poems rescue the lost emigrant culture, making a real Ireland and real myth out of Irish America. I am convinced it is a pioneering effort." --- James Liddy.
(see Coffee House Press)