A golden shovel after Li-Young Lee's From Blossoms

With each season there
is the reminder that we are

finite, our warm days,
our weeks remaining to say we

adore spring. We ache to live
longer, remember better, record as

perfectly as possible. We think: If
only I could document my way out of death

and begin our diaries. I wish it were
true, I have so many photographs and nowhere

to turn immortal. The Pacific coast in
October is the closest I have felt to the

afterlife, one long background
of mountains muscling out from

velvet sea. Landscape can be joy,
I learned that winter, or autumn, blind to

seasons in the eternal sun. I counted joy
like siblings: sister holds the ways to

make a dark place home, strings joy
at our doorstep with sand dollars pulled from

the cold surf. Brother's mind like a wing
spins me close enough to truth to

touch it. I take each one on my wing.
Lucky I belong in the middle, protected from 

firsts or lasts, ends, beginnings. A nasturtium blossom
is made of circles, celebrating centrality, lucky to

have a long flowering season. They blossom
from summer to fall on the coast. Spicier the closer to

dusk they are eaten. I wish it weren't impossible
to be joyous infinitely. To blossom

perennially, evergreen. I want to witness my brother's life. I want to
hear my sister laugh forever. I want the sweet

middle immortal as a photograph, a circle. I thought it impossible
for the entire flower to be edible. What dies gives. Even the blossom.
from the journal MISSOURI REVIEW
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Headshot of Poet Lynn Emanuel
Poet Lynn Emanuel on Writing Her New Collection

"Emanuel notes that her previous work had a 'joyousness with the language, and also a kind of playfulness.' But writing the poems in the new collection was 'more of a struggle....At the beginning of the pandemic it was really easy for me to write,' Emanuel explains. 'But that washed away. It became difficult. Sometimes in an interesting way, sometimes in a not-so-interesting way.'"

via PITTSBURGH CITY PAPER
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Cover of Poem Bitten by a Man
What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Teare on Other Arts

"In exceeding the frame of visual description, ekphrasis in the expanded field refuses to dwell only on the surface experience of visual art—or film or dance or music. Going outside of the frame and beneath the surface, it engages with another art by reconceptualizing and recontextualizing it: in its historical and cultural and subcultural contexts, its critical reception, its making and materials."
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