Life in the United States today is shot through with uncertainty about our jobs, our mortgaged houses, our retirement accounts, our health, our marriages, and the future that awaits our children. For many, our lives, public and private, have come to feel like the discomfort and unease you experience the day or two before you get really sick. Our life is a scratchy throat. John Marsh offers an unlikely remedy for this widespread malaise the poetry of Walt Whitman. Mired in personal and political depression, Marsh turned to Whitman—and it saved his life. In Walt We Trust How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself is a book about how Walt Whitman can save Americas life, too. Marsh identifies four sources for our contemporary malaise death, money, sex, democracy and then looks to a particular Whitman poem for relief from it.
