A Collection of Poems
Wherever Your Laughter Lives
Nineteen interconnected poems on loss and love, faith and family — and the single question that carries them home.
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Nineteen interconnected poems on loss and love, faith and family — and the single question that carries them home.
Wherever Your Laughter Lives is a collection of nineteen interconnected poems by A.W. Slocum — occupying the space between questioning, knowing, and saying, and moving through the dual realms of feeling and thought.
It was written because the written word can reach where the spoken cannot. Throughout, the voice is distinctive and diverse, capable of a child's pure delight or a drowning man's stoicism. Its settings conjure Central Park's Ramble, the New York subway, breaching whales, and the neon of worn-down roadside bars — alongside the voices of Kerouac and Buber, Dante and Hamlet, Sacagawea and Ra.
Above all, it is a book about a life: a brother lost too soon, a father's love spoken through a game of catch, turbulence weathered and survived, and the quiet grace of learning what it means to make it home safely.
The collection moves like a life — from the radiant certainties of youth, through the turbulence of adulthood, to the hard-won grace of maturity.
The earliest formations of self — a beloved brother, a father's catch, the carousel's promise of freedom, and the threshold of first love.
The story opens outward into turbulence — the existential depths adulthood demands we cross, and the crosses we are forced to bear.
Inward, to the most personal territory of all — from loss and illness to spirituality, unexpected grace, and the way home.
A coda. A reckoning and a reframing — and a son's hands steady on the wheel, steering confidently toward home.
All nineteen poems, free to read in full. Choose any to begin — each opens with its own illustration.
Absence, a teacher that selflessly gives: silently affirms my affection resides wherever your laughter lives.
— from "Absence"
Adam W. Slocum is a poet, coach, and founder who has spent a lifetime in the company of two languages — poetry and sport.
He grew up the younger of two boys very close in age, until his older brother Seth — luminous, mischievous, the boy who first put Adam's hands on a boat wheel — died at the age of five. That loss, and his father's wordless devotion in the seasons that followed (spoken, mostly, through a game of catch), became the wellspring of everything he would later write.
His own road ran through Amherst College and baseball played across three continents, through a hard reckoning with bipolar disorder, and home again to what he calls his home team — his wife Taryn, their son Andrew William Seth, and Cody, the dog who is quite sure he runs the neighborhood.
Today he pours the same conviction that animates these poems — that genuinely connecting with others and sharing joy is the most important thing we can give one another — into the two nonprofits he founded.
Adam's poetry and his nonprofits share one conviction: that connection and shared joy — through words, through play — are the most important things we can give each other. Both have the power to change lives.
Both exist to bring more joy into people's lives — to elevate the human spirit and the life trajectories of our youth, so they can live life to the fullest.