Poems 1994-2026

Résumé du livre

This book brings together more than thirty years of poems, the better part of an adult life, written across wildly different seasons of that life - a long, constantly evolving, ultimately unfinished argument with being alive. Its range is vast - for within these pages, one finds love, desire, loss, grief, rage, depression, exhaustion, the desperate longing for intimacy, the shocked disbelief at estrangement and betrayal, bleak, gallows humor, all of it bubbling to the surface in moments of sudden, unwished-for clarity. The tone shifts abruptly from intimate, savage, sardonic, and elegiac to the comic and surreal, in ways that are never entirely safe or predictable. The poems themselves range from free verse to the strictest of forms - sonnets, villanelles - inherited structures that are sometimes flawlessly inhabited, sometimes resisted, and, at other times, cracked wide open from within by the pressure of the emotions they unleash. What holds the book together is not theme but precisely that pressure. These poems inevitably return to the fault line where rupture and rapture blur - where damage, beauty, dread, and fleeting joy coexist without resolution. This is not a book to be consumed all at once, to be "mastered". It is a book to be inhabited, entered and exited, revisited, opened at random. Some pages may repel; others are likely to bore into the reader's psyche and linger far longer than expected or wished for. You may find the doors to long-sealed rooms within yourself thrown suddenly open - revealing memories, feelings, or recognitions that don't often surface, which at times console, and at others, terrify. You are likely to encounter, in these pages, a voice that feels strangely familiar - your deepest, most intimate voice, long forsaken, unheard for seeming ages, utterly strange yet desperately familiar - the voice of a long-lost friend who knows you far better than you might like, and who is also the siren song emanating from the core of your being: a voice that loves you, is you, your very blood, guts, and marrow, yet has not the slightest interest in protecting you from yourself.