William Tremblay: Purchase Books

Bill Tremblay's books are available for purchase from retail bookstores. They may also be purchased online.

	Walks Along the Ditch The poems in Walks Along the Ditch represent a turn in Bill Tremblay’s long, distinguished career. The political and social concerns are still present, and the powerful lyric invention that has marked his previous collections. What’s new is the poems’ meditative interiority, the sense of a man alone with his faiths, failures, feelings, and thoughts as he walks daily along the irrigation ditch near his house, the Rocky Mountains and great Colorado sky in the background, dwarfing all that anyone ever thought, did, or believed. The whole book has about it a passionate, mesmerizing calm.

	Magician's Hat: a Radio Play From the opening sounds of a cocktail party going on in George Gershwin’s Park Avenue Apartment on Halloween, 1936, and the first struck chords of music, this radio play makes the life and art of José David Alfaro Siqueiros, the great Mexican Muralist painter, come alive in vivid sound that creates a doorway into another world where Siqueiros meets and falls for Angelica Arenal, a war correspondent on her way to cover the Spanish Civil War...


	Magician's Hat: Poems on the Life of David Alfaro Siqueiros These poems engage the life of the famed Mexican muralist Jose "David" Alfaro Siqueiros, whose vision of a free, generous, and artistically liberated Mexico, completely responsive to both its people and its history, unified and informed his inner and outer worlds. It is a book about the muralist's sensibility, about the way in which his art and his human concerns synthesized in his work to become his vision. Less a biography than an interpretation of one artist's sensibility in love, war, and painting, it argues out its dialectic in a connected and accretive way. The result is a magical and riveting work of historiography and the lyric imagination.


	Shooting Script: Door of Fire 2004 Colorado Book Award Book of the Year Award 2003 Silver Medal —ForeWord Magazine Bill Tremblay's Shooting Script: Door of Fire is unlike any collection of poems previously published. In it, voice becomes a camera to reveal the smoky world of Diego Rivera's Mexico with its erotic and political tensions brightly drawn as background for a dance macabre involving, among others, Leon Trotsky, Rivera, the actress Paulette Goddard, Surrealist kingpin Andre Breton, and Rivera's strange and beautiful wife, Frida Kahlo.


	Rainstorm Over the Alphabet Written over a decade, the fifty-one poems in Bill Tremblay’s Rainstorm Over the Alphabet add up to a poetic memoir. Although a poet of remembrance and reckoning, Bill Tremblay is never a poet of stasis. As his speaker declares late in the book, “All you can think of is that you’re/ lucky to live in a town with a river,/ a little something going on all the time” (“Uses of the Slow Fade”).


	The June Rise: The Apocryphal Letters of Joseph Antoine Janis Sweeping from the austere beauty of the Rocky Mountains to the high plains, The June Rise brings to life the true story of Joseph Antoine Janis's visionary transformation from a Missouri farmboy to an advisor to Lakota chief, Red Cloud. Author William Tremblay creates a riveting collection of imagined letters by Janis that chronicle this pioneer's apprenticeship to his father in the beaver trade and his marriage with First Elk Woman, an Oglala holy woman, all the while capturing the spirit of the land in poetic descriptions, even as it becomes a killing ground during the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. The compelling forces that shape his decision form a classic story of the American frontier. This novel is, above all, a love story of the first order.