Year of the Poets

Praise From Kirkus Reviews
​"In Ballard’s highly readable, character-driven debut novel, the summer of 1976 proves messy, seductive and life-changing for celebrated poet, wanderer and serial womanizer Arthur Honeyman and all who enter his orbit..."
Read the rest at Kirkus Reviews

​It's the summer of '76 at the Davenport Summer Retreat for Artists, and fifty-nine year old Arthur Honeyman--Lothario, vagabond, carpenter, and, above all, renowned versifier--has his hands full: carrying on simultaneous affairs with two poetesses, composing his first manuscript of poems in years, and vacillating between making contact with his estranged son, Pablo, or just letting him be. Along the way, Honeyman's conviction that there are two kinds of people--"those who hold onto things, and those who get on with things"--will be put to the test, and he'll finally have to decide which one he wants to be. Inhabited by restless, searching people, Year of the Poets segues between northern Michigan, Mexico City, and points beyond. Set in the not-so-distant past of Cold War politics, typewriters, rotary phones, and handwritten missives, it's a story about the push and pull of kith and kin, as well as the burdens of sentimentality, memory, and denial that weigh upon us all.