The things that abandon you get remembered different.
As precise as the English language can be, with words
like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination
of sounds that describes only that leaving. Once,
drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked if
I'd longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have
dismissed him in the way that the youth dismiss it all:
a shrug, sarcasm, a jab to his stomach, laughter.
But he said longing. & in a different place, I might
have wept. Said, Once, my father lived with us & then he
didn't & it fucked me up so much I never thought about
his leaving until I held my own son in my arms & only
now speak on it. A man who drank Boone's Farm & Mad
Dog like water once told me & some friends that there is no
word for father where he comes from, not like we know it.
There, the word for father is the same as the word for listen.
The blunts we passed around let us forget our
tongues. Not that much though. But what if the old
head knew something? & if you have no father, you can't
hear straight. Years later, another friend wondered why
I named my son after my father. You know, that's a thing
turn your life to a prayer that nay dead man gonna answer.
from the journalTHE PARIS REVIEW
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Cover of Joseph Donahue's book, Wind Maps I-VII
"The Poet as a Dream Guide"

"In this book, as in so much of Donahue’s poetry, even the most ancient and esoteric spiritual ideas lead us to an understanding of contemporary events and the tragedies of our recent history, so that we can grapple with them and perhaps look beyond them to psychic, if not social, restoration."

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What Sparks Poetry:
Karen An-hwei Lee on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s “Farolita”

"Today, as I re-read this poem, I enjoy the way it yields to light, as if the paper strip changes into a page, and the page of the poem into a farolita, or vice versa. In this way, it’s mostly about light without saying the word light more than once. It blurs the boundaries of thingness and mystery, obliquely pointing us to tangible and intangible realms of knowing.."
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