“The Hour of the Rat” is one in a series of poems I wrote the first months of my daughter’s life. They were originally handwritten between midnight and four a.m. in six small, rainbow-colored notebooks, and recorded, among other things, the sounds that she made, and her—and our—coming into awareness. She was born August 9, 2018 (Nagasaki Day; I was born August 6, Hiroshima Day).
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“Her performing self made people feel they had seen the muse alive and just within reach . . . [S]he not only brought them to their feet, she brought them to her. In the heart of the Depression her collection of sonnets Fatal Interview sold 35,000 copies within the first two weeks of its publication.”
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"'Carrion Comfort' is music; it is magic; it is my old companion during the long dark nights I lie sleepless and wracked with hopelessness, clinging to the poem as evidence that another soul has met the struggle and come out of it burning, come carrying a beauty so dazzling it is hard to look at directly."
