ill’s Creek is a fierce, lyrical collection from poet Charlie Scott that drags memory into the light and makes it speak, sometimes tenderly, sometimes with teeth. Told often in an intimate first-person voice, these poems move through moments that feel almost mythic in their intensity: a child’s first brush with death inside the family, the pulse of terror in a “Man Dog” encounter that won’t loosen its grip, the grotesque comedy of a barroom drunk whose crude jokes land like bruises. Innocence is present, but it’s never safe, always one step from being shattered.
Threaded through these personal reckonings are echoes of history and literature: a great-uncle’s war-shadowed experience, the weight of inherited violence, and hard-won reflections that brush against the worlds of
Chekhov and
Dostoevsky. Again and again, Scott returns to the uneasy truth that memory is not a photograph, it’s a reconstruction, a revision, a story we keep retelling until it fits, or until it breaks.
What emerges is a collection that feels like standing at the edge of a dark creek at dusk: beautiful, still, and unnervingly alive with what’s underneath. Will’s Creek is for readers who crave poetry that doesn’t just remember, it wrestles, confesses, and dares to name what others leave unsaid.
