Sleep was a paltry wafer after we’d come back from watching the tide expose the beach’s softer districts & the sun beginning to spill through a murder-hole in an architrave of clouds. The open half of a lemon had been left in the kitchen, weeping into the grain of the table. The table corresponds with the woody pips; the lemon corresponds with a breakfast of fried eggs & butter melting into a slice of toast. It donated its other half to the piquancy of gin & tonics. I squeeze out what’s left of the juice & a paper cut I didn’t know I had begins to sing Puccini’s Vissi d’Arte.
"In my experience, the intense and honest attention required by a lyric poem tends to deepen and complicate the questions one has, and then reveals new ones on top of those—that process feels like growth. I suppose one measure of the speaker’s changing relationship with history and family throughout the book is this sense of deepening unknowing."
Poetry Daily stands with the Black community. We oppose racism, oppression, and police brutality. We will continue to amplify diverse voices in the poetry world. Black Lives Matter.
"Every translation is a collaboration among many, including all those who have come to this terrain before you. I am indebted even to those translations whose approach I reject because they gave me the benefit of having something to reject.
If nothing is to be lost, something must first be gained."
