From an email I received last night about The Conversation:

I . . . find myself moved on a number of fronts: your genuineness about poetry, your acumen, your conversational yet acute style and the range of your citations, among other things. I love how particular the book is, how it shows a poet--you--in the midst, as it were, of poetry. It's a marvelous and utterly original book. I hope it makes its way into some receptive hands. 

--Baron Wormser

***

And today is my older son's 21st birthday--a day of passage and celebration, and of elegy. He has become the adult version of the boy he always was: self-reliant, excited, funny, clever, adventurous, loving, hot-tempered, curious, concentrated, willful, talkative. This is the glory of watching a child grow up: discovering that he has become a friend for life.

***

I sit on the grass and

Start a poem, but the pathos of

It overcomes me. The future

Slips imperceptibly away.

Who can say what the years will bring?

--from "The Jade Flower Palace," by Tu Fu

***

Don’t be afraid to

lug a fat kid into rain, laugh when his mouth

flaps opens like a chick’s, stumble south

through weary dumps and truck-torn

roads, past autumn gnats who mourn

at Greaney’s turkey farm, where redcoats

sling up roosters heel by heel, slit throats,

drain hearts, while maples twist an eye-

blue sky, a rush of wild geese swings by:

good enough day to kill or die,

perch shivering on a tailgate, fly.

--from How the Crimes Happened, by Dawn Potter (CavanKerry Press, 2010)