Games for Children
Games for Children by Keith S. Wilson, published by Milkweed Editions in 2025, is a collection that showcases a diverse range of poetic forms and themes. This 152-page work melds applied science, faith, history, and personal narrative, presenting poems that explore the intersections of these elements with a unique perspective. The collection invites readers to engage with the complexities of life through a lens that combines both the instructional and the improvisational.
In this collection, Wilson employs various techniques to expand the boundaries of poetry, using visual elements and unconventional structures to deepen the reader’s experience. The poems reflect on themes of play and freedom, revealing tender truths through innovative approaches such as repurposing diagrams and intertwining historical references. Games for Children offers a thought-provoking exploration of how creativity can illuminate personal and collective narratives, making it a significant addition to contemporary literature and poetry.
Official synopsis Publisher
“A restless collection of incredible breadth, whose ability to meld applied science, faith, history, racial myth, and personal archive gives us poems whose power is unmistakable. A game-changing book.”–Rosalie Moffett, judge of the 2024 National Poetry Series
Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them. The Uncanny Valley diagram is repurposed to imagine a future Emmett Till never saw; visual instructions for line dancing stand in tension with the history of picking cotton; prayer is input as equation; a poem gerrymanders a sentence diagram. In these and other gestures, Wilson expands the possibility of what poetry can hold.
Thematically expansive and materially ambidextrous, Games for Children demonstrates how play is one of the highest forms of freedom, and in reclaiming it, our most tender truths are exposed.
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