poetry
Iridescent Pigeons
Yellow Arrow Publishing, forthcoming July 2024
Queer love, so often mischaracterized, contains multitudes. The poems within this chapbook represent it in romantic, maternal, filial, platonic, symbiotic, erotic, and sylvan modes. They also hold love and loss in cupped hands. We are mortal; so is love. We have life spans; so does love, whether measured in dog years, golden anniversaries, or the number of hours of a tryst that will expire at dawn. Amid the loss, retrieval and rebirth stir in poems that inhabit and annex traditional and endangered forms, such as a [William] Wordsworthian ode, an homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” a cento composed of phrases from Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a triptych of Sapphic stanzas.
creative nonfiction
Licking the Spoon
A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity
Seal Press, 2012
“In the spirit of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking, Candace Walsh uses the story of her passionate relationship to food to frame a powerful and honest account of her life.”
—Gretchen Rubin, author of the New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project
“When Candace Walsh writes with pride and joy of the day she brought her shiny, new KitchenAid home and recalls tenderly the comfort found in a simple chicken fricassée, those moments shimmer like oil in a hot pan.”
—Kirkus
“Funny, moving, and as irresistible as chocolate cake, Candace Walsh’s delicious memoir isn’t just a coming-of-age of a remarkable woman by way of the kitchen pantry, but a smart, gorgeously written exploration of the foods—and the people—who really nourish us.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author of the New York Times bestseller Pictures of You
“Candace Walsh’s luscious prose brings this memoir vividly to life. She weaves the comfort of food throughout her brave and ultimately uplifting quest to find her witty wonderful self. And we readers are nourished by coming along on Walsh’s journey. Bon appetit.”
—Cheryl Alters Jamison, four-time James Beard Award-winning author of Smoke & Spice, Tasting New Mexico, The Border Cookbook, and The Big Book of Outdoor Cooking & Entertaining
“Like Jane Eyre and Heartburn, Licking the Spoon is a book you won't be able to put down and a story you won't soon forget.”
—Theo Pauline Nestor, author of How to Sleep Alone in a King-Sized Bed
edited anthologies
Greetings from Janeland
Women Write More About Leaving Men for Women
Cleis Press, 2017
Dear John, I Love Jane
Women Write About Leaving Men
for Women
Seal Press, 2010
Ask Me About My Divorce
Women Open Up About Moving On
Seal Press, 2009