had traveled my friend's being so intensely
that it showed in her outermost layer,
had garbled her suddenly into random
charges, impulses, and pixels,
leaving only a haze where she had been,
a residue of panic, desire, exhaustion, and loneliness—
I could name all of its qualities—
but whatever had fashioned some of itself into my friend
had right then failed to be believably her,
and because what I am made and bound inside of is the same,
I understood that I would never know her.
-- From "My Friend in Herself"
About the book:
“What I’d had to undergo/ had been undergone”: above all, these are poems of what comes after, of release from “the night [that] had declined to let me go”—something akin to the last movement of the Pastoral Symphony, when there is a quality to the air that only comes after storm. What follows the hard-won exodus from self-enclosure, unburdened of that “immense archive of discontent,” is lightness of spirit and touch, and, for the reader, such pleasure in poems whose candor, wise and playful intelligence, and taut lyricism convey an ease-of-being that is of all things most rare.
—Eleanor Wilner
