Strange, you Googled waste management facility in search of recent developments in that industrial art and came upon this book of the same title. It’s poetry. And you’re reading it. Or maybe you were in search of something different in poetry and the odd title gave you hope, so you picked it up. Either case is possible. How could poetry satisfy such a wide audience? Might it be that the range of poems in Waste Management Facility (WMF) lend voice to industry’s working-class Americans or families who feel unheard or forgotten or quietly suffer? Or is that out of any human condition— power, oversight, identity denial, loss, love, desire, friendship, hate, violence, laxity—all, and more, covered in this book— “experiences are redeemed, not to be wasted … but to be managed with facility—and felicity!” as poet, Richard Hoffman, says of the poems. To reach, the poems mine ordinary experiences, but often veer into the “extra-[ordinary],” as author, Sven Birkerts suggests, for yield. Withiam’s poems have been called skeptical, probing, and quizzical. If none of this has you interested in the poems in this book, listen to poet, Clare M. Rossini: “[R]ead them because they are, simply, so damn good.”

* * *

So artfully staggered, so particular in their annotated moments, the poems in Waste Management Facility declare ‘it could only have been this way.’ Scott Withiam finds surprise in the ordinary and, by finding it, attaches the extra-. His syntax creates a steady live vibration as he assesses the damages found in family and the scrabble of the working life.

—Sven Birkerts, author of The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing

Scott Withiam's Waste Management Facility is a sustained engagement with reality that produces wonder after surreal wonder, and insight after surprising insight. Experience is here redeemed, not to be wasted nor turned into "candied cliché,/a tourist trap," but to be managed with a facility—and felicity!—that rewards reading after reading. These are poems discovered hiding in the actual world (“No words, just bubbles./ And what did that make me? A greasy dumpster raccoon/ feeling around for a clam underwater.”) Quirky and quizzical, familiar and strange at once, Withiam's poems raise the kind of questions that refresh and restore the potential for meaning-making. Waste Management Facility is the work of a poet at the top of his game.

—Richard Hoffman, author of People Once Real

Scott Withiam is a keen observer of the human condition and what we like to call ‘reality.’ But adhering to the dictum in physics where the observer changes what is observed by merely observing it, Withiam nakedly explores the truthfulness behind what he sees. He takes the adage, and the modern emblem, of ‘seeing-something-then-saying-something’ and extends the exhortation, and stands it on its head, by implying that saying something also alters what’s being seen. Withiam dives into what he observes, challenges the reader to discern falsity—the unreal—from the real. He demands both outward skepticism and internal contemplation, and in the end sends the reader into the downward (or upward) spiral of the detritus of ‘seeing-is-believing.’

 —Gian Lombardo, Director, Quale Press and Editor-in-Chief, Solstice Literary Magazine

Scott Withiam’s powerful poems about childhood, family, sexual awakening, friendship, and loss are both intimate and revelatory.  But what distinguishes Waste Management Facility is the poet’s portrayal of working-class employment—the temp jobs, multiple shifts, and abusive bosses that are a fact of life for so many Americans.  Read these poems not just for their probing narratives, their often-chilling depictions of all the ways the American dream can crash and burn; read them because they are, simply, so damn good, their language and music rooted in what Whitman called the permanent flowing.   

—Clare M. Rossini, author of Lingo

For some poets, the past calls to the present. For Scott Withiam, the past is the present, and it’s peopled by those looking after their best interests, striving and stumbling. His compassion is steady and so is his streetwise eye. His poems offer “delight / considering the strange gifts I’d bring, / if allowed to visit.” I’d let him in if I were you.

—Ron Slate, author of Joy Ride

Waste Management Facility
by Scott Withiam
$21.95, paperback, 112 pp
ISBN-13:  978-1-952335-98-3

• Tweet