The Sleep Accusations

Randall Watson's first full-length collection reveals the tenderness in situations and perceptions so extreme, we would normally consider them hallucinatory. Tornadoes, floods, sudden transformations, inexplicable weeping, tragic waitresses, "A woman and a man and what lies between them,/ a wall and a look, an eye, a house/ in Paris, a rising, a trinity/ of entrance, triumvirate/ of possibility." All of this brought with such crispness of timing, such fresh and intimate voicing, it is a great pleasure to read and recognize this world you never expected you had known.

Randall Watson

Randall Watson is originally from Kansas and New York, and now lives in Houston, Texas. He is currently employed as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Houston and as an Instructor of English at Houston Community College. He frequently travels on trekking expeditions ranging from Patagonia to Peru, Tibet to Alaska.

Reviews

I love the startling imagery and exuberant imagination at the heart of Randall Watson's long-awaited collection The Sleep Accusations, which is a work of deep spiritual quest, a book of real marvels, as if the stillness at the center of its rage were a kind of vision.

—Edward Hirsch, author of Wild Gratitude

I have been waiting a long time for this book. Randall Watson is a wild poet who is dead calm at the center, which makes for a narrative poem of lyric intensity, which means, for me, great pleasure. I urge you: sit somewhere quietly and read this book, urgently.

—Thomas Lux, author of The Cradle Place

These brief glimpses of an at first angrily closed in persona's slow growth towards the beginnings of self knowledge culminate in a luminous, far-reaching generosity towards self and others which is truly breathtaking. At times colloquial, even street smart, Randall Watson's imagery is, nevertheless, as gorgeous as it is psychologically sensitive. With one eye on the river, the other on the air above, his long coiling lines loop out over the pages of this lovely book patiently, with the lean, transcendent grace, the delicate precision of a fly fisherman.

—Patricia Goedicke, author of Invisible Horses

Reading these poems is like entering a theater where a violent movie has just been played and replaced by tenderness. The Sleep Accusations is a brilliant first book, violent and tender.

—Adam Zagajewski, author of Another Beauty

Just back from the Dairy Queen, the Oconee Hotel, or Café Brasil, the speakers of Randall Watson's poems have journeyed through the world—partaken of its mundane blahness and its exotica—and now in these poems the speakers stand, taking stock, breathless but unflinching at a juncture between rapture and despair, grittiness and grace.

—Nance Van Winckel, author of Beside Ourselves

Ordering Information

To purchase The Sleep Accusations by Randall Watson, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available online at UPNE, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.