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Poetry. "FILCHED: to steal a small thing, casually, as if it belonged to the filcher, anyway, or as if it were no one's thing to keep. The poems in James Tolan's FILCHED are such stolen things, treasures pilfered from a shipwrecked world with a deft hand -- joy filched from heartache, laughter filched from pain -- and he offers these treasures up to us, makes us complicit, makes them also ours, these poems, this world in which a lover's cries in the act of love become the cries of angels, too. Tolan takes us deeply into the sensibilities of a boy, a man, into how it feels to be alive in a male body in these times, how it feels to emerge from the 'temporary tomb' of an MRI machine to recall his young son at the beach, screaming into the waves, charging into the surf, admonishing his father, 'We can't give up. We/have to fight.' And so back into the waves they go, 'wild into the wake.' This is an achingly gorgeous book, full of grit and love and wonder and hope." --Cecilia Woloch