“Elegant and intimate… Delbos proves his deep attunement to the natural, and to bright blasts of language.”
–Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe

Small Talk reimagines idle chatter with heightened lyricism and expansive scope in poems that are devoted to the minute particulars of life and language.

The book’s first section, “Here Nor There,” moves among diverse locations including Plymouth, Prague, Salzburg and Belgrade. These poems meditate on translocality, examining the evanescence of relationships and experience, the intimacy of presence and absence, and memory’s perseverance.

The long poem “A Child’s Guide to Candor” records and reflects upon a child’s journey toward speech, exploring a parent’s role in providing their children’s words, and interrogating the relationship between language, nationality, family roles and relationships.

“News and Selected Poems,” the last section, begins with poems addressing the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the bombing of the Boston Marathon, and violence in Gaza, considering the relationships between event, language, and media presentation. The ensuing elegies and narrative poems allude to cultural figures including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Charles Bronson, Dick Gregory, Michael Jackson, Pilgrim settlers and Wampanoag tribespeople, scrutinizing the overlap of personal and public history, and the creation of cultural identity.