Terence Winch's new book, Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor (Hanging Loose Press), is now available.

Advance praise

Whether they arise from the actual or the conceptual, Terence Winch's poems are plugged directly into real experience, and they convey the quiet authority of what is true. He writes with a sure hand and fine sense of the playful slipperiness of language.
---Billy Collins

The title of Terence Winch's newest collection says it all: the wonderfully droll, self-deprecating, hard-hitting and deliciously comic narrator of these poems knows only too well what life exacts from us. A trivial event like losing one's watch and replacing it brings on the rueful recognition that "it ran so fast, / I had to live every day / as if it were tomorrow." It's a dilemma we all face. No rest for the weary! In a sequence of dazzling and poignant memory poems about love and death, friendship and family trauma, Winch once again displays his uncanny ability to take the most ordinary of incidents and endow them with radiance. One reads Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor with a steady shock of recognition. Here WE are!
---Marjorie Perloff

Part satyr, part fierce angel, Winch manages a voice so full of tenderness and delicious drollery that you know you'd be lucky to spend time with this guy in a pub. They say we like other people who make us feel good, who make us laugh, and these are poems that aim to provide the kind of deep enjoyment and entertainment we need. They aim to, and they do: the voice of these poems moves seamlessly through free verse and traditional forms (villanelles and a sestina, even), through the dream-life's nightmares and the real world of public transit, through memory and tomfoolery, wit and despair; the virtue these poems always embrace, however, is camaraderie. You can imagine Whitman enjoying these poems, just as both Billy Collins and Marjorie Perloff have said they do. ---David McAleavey (in an Amazon review)

Read David Lehman's piece on the new book at The Best American Poetry blog.

For Earle Hitchner's essay on the book, "Poet Terence Winch Pours a Potent 'Fifth'"---go to the Irish Echo [n.b.: end of piece is missing here].

See Michael Lally's post on Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor at Michael's blog, Lally's Alley.

Read Laura Orem's take in the Innisfree Poetry Journal.

Geoff Himes reviews the new book here: Baltimore City Paper.

To order Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor, click on CONTACT.

For more information on Terence Winch's book of poems,

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)