A sequel to the award-winning Buffalo Dance, Frank X Walker's When Winter Come: The Ascension of York is a dramatic reimagining of Lewis and Clark's legendary exploration of the American West. Grounded in the history of the famous trip, Walker's vibrant account allows York--little more than a forgotten footnote in traditional narratives--to embody the full range of human ability, knowledge, emotion, and experience. Knowledge of the seasons unfolds to York "like a book," and he "can read moss, sunsets, the moon, and a mare's foaling time with a touch."

During the journey, York forges a spiritual connection and shares sensual delights with a Nez Perce woman, and Walker's poems capture the profound feelings of love and loss on each side of this ill-fated meeting of souls. As the perspectives of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and others in the party emerge, Walker also gives voice to York's knife, his hunting shirt, and the river waters that have borne thousands of travelers before and after the Lewis and Clark expedition.

The alternately heartbreaking and uplifting poems in When Winter Come are told from multiple perspectives and rendered in vivid detail. When Winter Come exalts the historical persona of a slave and lifts the soul of a man; York ascends out of his chains, out of oblivion, and into flight.

Frank X Walker is the author of Black Box, Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York , and Affrilachia. The recipient of a 2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Lillian Smith Book Award, and the Thomas D. Clark Award for Literary Excellence, Walker is Writer-in-Residence at Northern Kentucky University.

See other titles in the series Kentucky Voices

Reviews

Few artists from the mountains have used the hills as successfully as a springboard to something as important as poetry as Frank X Walker.-troybodyculture.blogspot.com

"Frank X Walker has re-imagined the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition in a way no one else has before. This powerful and insightful book is more than an admirable sequel to Buffalo Dance. It is a careful re-examination of historical records, re-imagined and conjured into a concert of voices whose aim is truth. One can read When Winter Come through from beginning to end like a good novel, and then go back and savor it one poem at time. Walker has given all of us who care about American Literature a lasting gift."--Greg Pape, Montana Poet Laureate (2007-2009) and author of Sunflower Facing the Sun and Border Crossings

 "The lyrical and moving poetry of Frank Walker has given York a voice and brought to life his world of slavery, adventure, love, nature, and African and Native American mythology."--James J. Holmberg, Curator of Special Collections, The Filson Historical Society; Lewis & Clark and York historian.

"When Winter Come is a courageous book that asks a lot of the American memory --as it should --and does it beautifully. I rarely find myself as submerged as I was in this work. Real food for the soul."--Tim Seibles, author of Buffalo Head Solos and Hurdy-Gurdy

"I heard Walker read these poems. Now there is the delight of reading them yourself with this book. They are honest, true, raw, brilliantly conceived. An important contribution to illuminating our past and making it alive." --Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within and The Great Failure: My Unexpected Path to Truth

"Beginning with "Buffalo Dance" and continuing with the groundbreaking "When Winter Come" Frank X. Walker's lyrical and stunning resurrection of York is an unparalleled creative discourse. The poet, in stanzas probing and revelatory, opens the slave's life wide, not examining York as much as inhabiting him, laying bare the complications, frailties and triumphs that history dims and denies. There is much here that we do not know, and we are blessed that it is Walker who has taken on this chronicle of York's "other life"--with the same unflinching passion, the same deft characterization and the same undeniable courage."--Patricia Smith, author of Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the National Poetry Series

"When Winter Comes is an astonishing collection of poems that ushers Frank X Walker into the company of other memorable poets like Roethke, Hugo, Clifton, and Dove but he also recollects the powerful narrative voice of Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter or Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Frank X Walker magically captures York, not the flat historical figure represented in Lewis & Clark's journals--Walker has tapped into the true voice of York and conjured him on the page. This is not just a book of poems--this is a book of spirits and shimmering apparitions."--Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red

"A volume of historical fiction in poetic form. . . .Walker gives voice to this overlooked historical figure."--Virginia Quarterly Review

"Frank X. Walker is one of the most important voice in contemporary Appalachian poetry, someone who, like the medicine man in this new volume's 'Real Medicine,' 'sing[s] a healing song.'"-Southern Quarterly