WILD WALT AND THE ROCK CREEK GANG

In this novel by Anonymous an educator in Washington, D.C., stumbles into a strange world that promises to reveal literary secrets.

As this story opens, the poet Walt Whitman is saying a final farewell to his beloved Rock Creek in the nation’s capital. It’s the summer of 1864, and Walt has spent the past few years of the Civil War comforting the sick and dying in Washington’s Armory Square Hospital. Walt, who’s emotionally broken and largely unknown at this point in his career, stumbles upon Ezra, a former slave, and June, a high society girl, who live together in the wilderness as a two-person “army of poetry lovers.” They claim to communicate with the spirit of the poet John Keats, who, they say, lives in Ezra’s soul, and they pledge to make sure that Walt is remembered as a great poet. The novel jumps to the present day to introduce narrator Jack, a community college teacher and aficionado of Keats’ work who finds himself broke and sitting in Rock Creek Park. There, he encounters an enigmatic stranger known as “Cowboy” who, along with his gang, claims to protect a “secret world” in the woods that Walt created. As Jack is led further into Cowboy’s esoteric community, its mystery is slowly revealed, which makes for compelling reading—particularly in how it forges a link to Ezra and June’s story. The novel is effectively a playground for philosophical conversation, and the author carefully and convincingly captures Whitman’s sensibilities as both a flâneur and a transcendentalist: “My undistracted spirit could pour itself into any living miracle I came upon. I could inhabit ordinary working people, the pit of a peach, a powerful sunrise—anything.” The novel is also steeped in literary history, as when it refers to Richard Brautigan’s 1968 novel, In Watermelon Sugar, in which “people lived in quaint, little shacks in a mind-bending forest full of magical creeks,” offering a distorted reflection of Cowboy’s own perception of Rock Creek Park. Readers with a limited knowledge of poetry, particularly that of Whitman and Keats, may struggle to engage with this book, but others will find it an enjoyably weird and imaginative literary journey.

Engrossing, intricately embroidered, and refreshingly original.