When you finished, several minutes passed before we spoke. You dipped a finger in a pool of candle wax. How could I know this was the only real secret you’d ever kept?
I was able to visualize my hometown so much more keenly, having not lived there in fifteen years. I believe it allowed me to write about the place with a little bit more compassion than if I had tried to write these books living there.
[T]here is a speaker who will simply persevere, who will, like “the heart trying to leave the chest,” keep going, and by keeping going, will tend always, though it’s sometimes hard, toward human connection. Toward love.
Though this account is full of wounds, losses, and hardships, the Sonia who emerges herein speaks of them with the kind of sinewy, bracing directness you would expect of a complete stranger sitting across from you at the bar.
I typed, Are you aging? Are you tired and worn? Do you spend all your time fretting about the fine lines on your face and how they foretell the slow and steady march toward death or, worse, that moment when the world will turn its eyes from your old & unbeautiful face?
I don’t believe we come to nor travel through poetry alone . . . Rather than “social” I would instead encourage the word “communal”; the former sounds a little more performative and exclusive to my ear than does the latter, which sounds more like an invitation.