my lungs are a divebar

"In a time when many books seem eager to flaunt their ethics, Walter Moore's my lungs are a dive bar offers a refreshing departure. There's a striking negative capability here, an impulse to approach everything and everyone with both a side-eye and a dose of empathy. These poems are gritty, unflinching, cagey. But for all the anti-epiphanic moves Moore makes, he allows for tenderness and beauty, as seen in the remarkable poem "family history." Here, there's a desire to retrace a lineage back to something "before any / violence / to write about." The futility of such an action is one of this book's startling moments of tragic wisdom. This is the voice of a casual prophet, a rapscallion, a hoarse cough in the back of a dark bar, a bloodied knuckle dragging across an iron window grate. It's one you won't soon forget."

--Corey Van Landingham, Antidote, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens

"Hilarious, painful, and outrageous - often in the same phrase. Drawing from overheard fist fights, willfully eschewed observations, and half-a-lifetime of wrong turns turned right, Walter Moore crafts nail-sharp poems and prose explosions with a kind of screaming, laughing brilliance that is not to be missed. These pages will slap your eyes until everything you see shines."

--Owen Egerton, Hollow

"Here is an honest underworld of poverty, booze, smoke, fighting, loving, debt, work, and redemptive friendship. The players are self-deprecating and cocky, punkish and tender, absurd and sincere as they make fun of and try to hang-on to their troubled America. Walter Moore is a terrific poet whose voice is soaked in the millennial experiences of music, film, media and seeing through bullshit."

--Henry Hughes, Bunch of Animals, Men Holding Egg