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Jean Valentine
Shackleton, diary

Next to where their ship went down
they pitched their linen tents.

You, mountain-climbing,
mountain-climbing,
wearing your dead father's flight jacket—

My scalp is alive,
love touched it. My eyes are open water. Yours too.

Sitting in the dark Baltimore bar
drinking Coke
with you with your inoperable cancer
with your meds

no tent
no care what we look like
what we say

Later that night, in my room
looking into the mirror, to tell the truth I was loved.
I looked right through into nothing.
from the book A HOUSE CALLED TOMORROW / Copper Canyon Press
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Cover of Dong Li's Book, The Orange Tree
A Conversation with Dong Li

"To me, it's the 'underfacts,' the undercurrents, that are more interesting. You want to excavate the feelings from those moments. There has never been fear in me to forget. I want to examine my life. To see where the mistakes are, to see where I could do better. In terms of poetry, I feel like I'm not just one person writing this book. I felt that these other people [in my family] were behind me, looking. They cannot speak, or at least they are not speaking in our time. But I wanted to feel their presence."

via CLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Robert Matt Taylor on Philip Levine’s What Work Is


"Even to my jaundiced eye it read like a perfect condensation of the big feelings of that moment. This is a thing that only poetry can do, I was reminded. "Scouting" and many like it in the book comprise a poetry of awakening, of simple amazement at being alive, at having lived and at the living still to be done, of making meaning out of the morass of experience, time, and trouble."
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