Call Waiting

This full-length poetry collection from art historian David C. Ward combines wry meditations on 21st-century life, work, and family with observations of America—its landscapes, its history, its social and foreign policy. Ward’s poems are peopled by those who seem never quite able to inhabit their own lives: from well-known figures such as Andy Warhol and vanished poet Weldon Kees to Ward’s own father, a nighthawk playing poker against himself in the early hours. The book’s final section turns an unflinching gaze on the post-9/11 United States and its self-deceptions.

David C. Ward is a senior historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic and the coauthor of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. His poetry collection Internal Difference was published in 2011, and his verse was anthologized in New Poetries V. He lives in Washington, DC.