Left at the Ruin
These poems, these words, they are quiet fires every one. Palpable feeling comes out of these lines, rendering an intimacy melancholy but celebratory too in their constant acts of self-discovery. These poems are in immediate conversation with the reader, speaking—never shouting—their startling news of the everyday uncovered, or recovered, in stunning moments of feeling: “the sheer joy of being a body, / keeping it up all night.” The poems live true to their insights, traversing some imaginary line: “Give desire a boundary / and it sails across.” Those words speak for the book, but they come with a quiet kind of sadness as well: “All of my ages swarm / against the mismatch of time.” We may know that sensibility ourselves intellectually, but in these poems we are made to truly feel it.
—Alberto Rios, Not Go Away Is My Name
