Westerly

“Everything in [Westerly] heralds a seriously important career.”—Publishers Weekly

“Schutt’s debut investigates death, life, and language with the intimate precision of a painter’s attention to a still life.”—Booklist

“The poems in Westerly explore dark existential territory with a kind of shimmering intelligence, and Schutt’s imagery is unexpected and beautifully wrought.”—Maria Browning, Chapter 16

“Westerly marks the debut of a poet whose skill on the page will continue to point our way forward.”—Blackbird

“Schutt’s debut collection gathers disparate strands into a tightly bound weave.”—John Casteen, Virginia Quarterly Review

“Will Schutt’s Westerly takes on nothing less than, on the one hand, the ways in which we, the living, both late and soon, make our stumbling way westward, mostly oblivious to the fact of mortality and, on the other hand, how the dead make their resonant way back to us, sometimes as memory, sometimes as guide directing us toward and through the inevitable. . . . This is a book of uncommon wisdom. . . . Its poems sustain me. They give me hope—which may very well be, among gifts, the one we need most.”—Carl Phillips