Choose a collection.
Wherever Your Laughter Lives
Nineteen interconnected poems on love and loss, family and faith.
Enter the book →The Things That Sustain
A poetry collection. Twenty-one poems.
Enter the book →Spinning Ball
A poetry collection. Twenty-one poems.
Enter the book →Poetry takes the wheelwhenever ordinary language fails.
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.
poems
& a coda
in full
Three movements, and a coda.
The collection moves like a life — from the radiant certainties of youth, through the turbulence of adulthood, to the hard-won grace of maturity.
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The complete collection.
All nineteen poems, free to read in full. Choose any to begin — each opens with its own illustration.
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Absence, a teacher that selflessly gives: silently affirms my affection resides wherever your laughter lives.
— from "Absence"
The things we choose to carry,and learning to pass them on.
This is a collection about the things we choose to carry, and the quiet grace of learning to pass them on. It's about rootedness and reaching, grief and connection, the space between words—and what lives there.
The poems ask what we owe each other across distance and time, why we keep watch for beauty in broken things, and whether friendship endures despite decades of neglect. They move from spiritual questioning through intimate domestic life to the hard-won understanding that we are never alone—not because God intervenes, but because we're woven together in ways we can't see.
Twenty-one poems.
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Chasing and Observing
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Twenty-one poems.
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About A.W. Slocum
Adam W. Slocum is a poet, coach, and founder who has spent a lifetime in the company of two languages — poetry and sports.
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 mental health challenge, 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.
The same belief, two ways of reaching out.
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.
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{{ o.domain }} →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.
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