Finally, yesterday, I finished the first stage of the enormous editing project that has been consuming all my writing time. The book will come back to me after the authors look at the changes, but the next editing stage should be considerably less arduous. So that's all good, and on another bright side, I will get paid. Nonetheless, I've woken up on this grim Saturday sleet-morning feeling like my head is full of fluff, and that none of this fluff is intelligent.

Last week I read my friend Meg Kearney's new poetry collection Home by Now, and I wrote to her immediately in my excitement because I could feel her doing in her poems what I have tried, always, to do in mine: "to narrate the knife-edge of emotion. And I mean 'narrate' because your poems are dramas; they move the reader in and out of the tale, in and out of sensation. They press me to the point I'm always trying to press myself into and run away from at the same time: that kind of dreadful clarity of too-much feeling. This all sounds intensely inarticulate. But I hope you know what I mean. What I mean is that I know how much that excoriates and exhilarates at the same time. I love that you and your poems make me know you're here, alongside me, in my same old leaky boat."

But on mornings like today, I'm close to believing that I may never recognize that knife-edge again. It's a bad thought, and I hope it goes away.