Read these poems and waltz across borderland America, from L.A. to El Paso, from South Central to East Los.  Larry Welsh is a true and unfailing guide.  His good-hearted poems are always abierto to the willing traveler.  Rusted Steel and Bordertown Starts is a sweet and unforgettable ride.

-- Rick DeMarinis
   Borrowed Hearts: New & Selected Stories

Lawrence Welsh doesn't pen and ink his poems, he uses his fingernails and martyrs blood.  He's a sleeping insomniac with both eyes open.  Watch out for these poems, for they are made with a passionate, witty, indomitable dynamite.  Read what's in this book before it explodes in your hands.   
 
-- Michael C Ford
     Grammy Award Nominee
     Spoken Word Category

One of El Paso's finest poets.

-- El Paso Times

Lawrence Welsh is a rough and tumble desert writer.  His poems are lean meat, the fat trimmed off, and ready for the grill; sparse southwestern images that paint realism onto the page, bone-clean and razor sharp.

-- James Lee Jobe/Editor
    One(dog)press

You can hear the smoke and five o'clock shadow in these poems.  From the days where DA didn't mean district attorney, and the Cadillacs could give a steamroller a run for it's money. Here's someone who knows how to drain the mercury from their blood and serve it up with a couple of eggs, white hot.

--  Driver's Side Airbag
    Los Angeles

Lawrence Welsh is one of our most important border region poets.

-- Beyond Baroque
    Literary Arts Center
    Venice, California

Lawrence Welsh’s poems remain in my mind as beautiful, true, magical…they both sing the blues and sing praise at the same time.

-- Emmy Perez
    Solstice
    Swan Scythe Press  

One might assume that Lawrence Welsh is a poet strongly drawn to local color and the romantic Old West, but a close reading of his work only proves this assumption wrong.  WALKING BACKWARDS TO SANTA FE is anything but a work of local color.  And, while some of the poems tap into the rich tradition of the Old West, the thrust of these poems is toward something darker, something deeper.

-- Todd Moore
   Dillinger
   The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

Quotes:

Lawrence Welsh is a shaman with words.  He whirls flowers and moons and skies and adobe mud around and around and mixes them with his hard-won wisdom.  He scrapes his initials into them with his soul’s white tooth, his word chisel.  Carry it on, brother. Skull Highway is fine, fine work.

-- Jimmy Santiago Baca
    Grove/Atlantic Press
    New Directions Publishing Corporation

Lawrence Welsh is one of America’s leading writers on life in border towns, having written material for more than 100 magazines and anthologies.

-- Los Angeles Daily Journal

It’s getting harder and harder to pull off poems with Southwest imagery, but Welsh has worked form, content and diction to make it all new again.

-- Kathleene West/Poetry Editor
   Puerto del Sol

Lawrence Welsh’s spare and often startling images of the Southwest -- pinon, black mesa, the “bones holding pictures of you” -- haunt with what’s left out and make me wild to be in the desert again.

-- Lyn Lifshin
   Black Sparrow Press   

Welsh’s poem, “After the Great Hunger,” won because of its strong wording and imagery as well as its wonderful sense of Ireland, her people and her legacy.

-- Bardsong Press/Judges Citation 
   The Fourth Annual Celtic Voice Writin
    Award in Poetry

The Southwest is a special place for me and Lawrence Welsh's poems capture the borderline desert and its ambiguities: the physical and human debris, the promises and hopelessness, the subtle beauties, the correspondences of the landscape and the inner life. If Los Angeles is where it all starts, El Paso is where it ends.  Welsh evokes the rhythms and richness of the requiem.

-- Gerald Locklin
   California State University, Long Beach

Rusted Steel and Bordertown Starts makes Lawrence Welsh the poet laureate of El Paso.  This book is uncanny and beautiful, an evocation of outlaws, desert rats, dice, Marty Robbins, Mexican food joints, margaritas, Zapata, Villa, Bob Wills, iguanas, Ava Gardner, Ray Price, Freddy Fender, Juarez and Link Wray.  Welsh captures the earthy outlaw beauty of the land.  He captures the spirit of the people.  

-- Tony Moffeit
    Poet in Residence
    University of Southern Colorado, Pueblo

Lawrence Welsh declares and maps the turf he rides with clarity, sympathy, responsibility and edge.

-- David Meltzer
   New College of California