Madeleine Wattenberg’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Puerto del Sol, cream city review, sixth finch, DIAGRAM, Guernica, and Best New Poets. She regularly writes poetry reviews for The Bind and is a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati, where she also reads for the Cincinnati Review.
Inside a used bookstore at a grotesquely outsized strip mall in Fremont, California, I first pulled Li-Young Lee’s 1986 chapbook Rose from the shelf, a volume so thin the spine…