In case you missed it the first time around: Vox Populi has reprinted my recent blog post, "Dear Presidential Candidates: A Modest Proposal." It's funny how well that post went over. As I told you before, it's by far the most-read post on this blog, and I wonder how it will do among a larger readership.

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My friend Maureen mailed me a beautiful letterpress chapbook of Joe Bolton's poem cycle Breckinridge County Suite, recently released by Tavern Books in Portland, Oregon. I have read these poems before (they are included in The Last Nostalgia), but seeing them in this format is surprising and, for some reason, very moving. You know how much I love Bolton's work, but I haven't often concentrated on the shape of his poems. Now this version is pressing me to consider their visual arrangement as an element of power. Thank you, Maureen, for such a remarkable gift.

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My friend David, so prescient and patient with words, sent me this picture from Canada: "Tonight taking out the recycle, a jet vapour trail in the night sky. It looks like the ghost of one, but just above it the pinpoint of light of a star, and for a moment this little geometry in the sky is not clinical but warm and lovely, imperfect in its bending as it fades. A delicate thing."

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from "I Walk Out into the Country at Night" by Lu Yu, translated by Kenneth Rexroth

I come home late. The night
Is half spent. I stand for a
Long while in the doorway.
My young son is still up, reading.
Suddenly he bursts out laughing,
And all the sadness of the
Twilight of my life is gone.