The Poetry of Strangers

April 13, 2020
In this earnest and soulful debut memoir, poet Sonia-Wallace writes of busking poetry across America. In 2012, he set up a typewriter on a table at a Los Angeles street fair, offering to write poems on demand. It was mostly a joke for the out-of-work actor—until a tough young Chicana woman asks for a poem about her long-absent father, then nearly breaks down upon reading his verse. In pursuing his craft, Sonia-Wallace wins an all-expenses paid writing residency on Amtrak, which he uses to attend a one-week poetry residency given by the Mall of America to write verse for shoppers. “In the end, 20 percent of all the people I wrote for in the mall wound up in tears,” he writes. Then he meets Eowyn, a witch, at Michigan’s Electric Forest Music Festival. He later visits her in Salem, Mass., during which time he gains insight into his own queer identity and realizes he’s indulged in opting in and out of identifying as queer. He then “marks” himself as queer for the first time by painting his nails in an act of “radical adornment.” By the end, poetry evolves far beyond a whim for Sonia-Wallace; as a teacher to other queer poets he now values his role in strangers’ lives—“We are starving for someone to listen.” Readers will be heartened and inspired by Sonia-Wallace’s artistic and spiritual coming-of-age.

April 15, 2020
A writer travels the U.S. with his typewriter, crafting custom poems for those he meets along the way. It began as a one-month performance art experiment. Sonia-Wallace had graduated from college, been laid off from his job, and recently suffered a breakup with his first long-term boyfriend, "the one I was with when I came out as gay to my parents." After hearing a story on the radio about someone who sold poems in the park, he decided to try and earn his rent by busking verse for strangers. He went from setting up his typewriter at sidewalks and swap meets to becoming a writer-in-residence for Amtrak and the Mall of America. What began as something "between an avant-garde solo show and a practical joke" became a surprising passport to the inner sanctum of peoples' hearts and minds. This heartwarming essay collection chronicles many of the author's travels, the people he met, and a few of the things he learned in the process. Much like his geographical journeys, Sonia-Wallace's writing meanders through his own past, across history, and touches on some wildly disparate topics, including politics, evangelicalism, music festivals, and California wildfires, to name a few. While poetic verse is the common denominator of each essay, the theme that ties it all together is how similar we all are at the core. From the 95-year-old widower who became the author's steady companion on the train to the nonbinary witchcraft collective he visited in Massachusetts, Sonia-Wallace recognized the same thing in just about everyone he met: the longing to be seen and heard. "Most people just need their stories to be heard," he writes. "And that need in the right word. That we lose something when our stories are not heard. That something not only in us, but in the world, dies." An enlightening project that exposes how alike we are in our differences. (first printing of 25,000)

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