Review David Walker's Donating Organs in Boxes is not merely a collection of love poems. Instead, they blend the grit and tenderness of the everyday into a manifesto of how to love through the hurdles of expectation and disappointment, each of which scenario we feel "like road salt / through a boot," both distinct and universal in their narratives. These poems are indeed about loving the beloved, but also about re-learning to love parents, childhood memories, steamed broccoli, and-sometimes the hardest of all-ourselves. "An artist can't perform miracles," but the candid, vivid moments in this collection sear straight to the complex heart of things "like the singe of a hot light bulb," and accomplishes the best of what art can do: remind us of the ephemeral beauty in connection. -Lisa Mangini, editor of Paper Nautilus The poems of David Walker's Donating Organs in Boxes know that honest love-between partners, between family, and even with the self-contains a dash of suffering and a dollop of abandonment. Walker mines topics like marriage, the Red Sox, and the extraordinary landscape of human emotion, and delivers poems that "lovers [could sob] out to end an argument." In a world so often seemingly bent on division, here is a book that argues for some much needed tenderness. -Keith Leonard, author of Ramshackle Ode What is an organ but an instrument, one that keeps us alive physically or spiritually? David Walker's Donating Organs in Boxes accomplishes both. Through the organ of the heart and maybe even a ballpark's organ, Walker skillfully invites our own contemplations on love as a job, as loss, as the endpoint of time and reason. The role of language, how it's taboo for poets to even utter the word "love," is interrogated. These skillfully executed poems, multifarious in form and narrative, draw from loves across our lifetime and our galaxy. In "You once said," Walker writes: ..".I don't understand / it, but it's what I want." In Donating Organs in Boxes, "it" comes in the form of love. -Sandra Marchetti, author of Confluence and Sight Lines About the Author David Walker was introspective from a young age. His parents often reminisce of long car rides with him in silence, only broken sporadically by the clumsily organized musings of his childlike observations. When they passed a cow grazing in a field, David would mentally dissect the heifer like a butcher-examining the stifle, dewlap, and fetlock until he could render an ill-cut chunk of meat. If he were older, they would have called him a poet. At the time, however, he was simply precocious. David now has a precocious youngster of his own with the love of his life, Caitlin. Fatherhood has happily monopolized his time and his ultimate goal is setting good examples for his son. David's nighttime routine consists of reading A Series of Unfortunate Events to his oft-distracted toddler before rocking him to sleep. Poetry is in his everyday. David currently holds an MFA in Poetry from Southern Connecticut State University. He has been a workshop leader at the Salem Poetry Seminar and the Freshwater Poetry Festival. Many of his poetry and one of his short stories appear online and in print. He has read his work at various venues across the country and is the founding editor of Golden Walkman Magazine, a literary magazine in the form of a podcast.