What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay.
If you have grieved you have loved. Twinned, like the sun's thread-corona, the moon's deepening pearl. The violent deaths of stars an expanse through which everything moves—lights thrown from collapse. You are coastal, throatless, roaming through people that hold tight then let go. You are the blue forest through which sunbeams sweep. And you are nothing but actions of the loom threading aster and hunger. You are nothing but roads interrupted by wheels. What will be left in us but pure admiration? Dust released into night.
"I read from The Nightfields most mornings for the vertiginous pleasure of scale, for the sense of intimacy and infinitude, in order to feel my insignificance in the world. Our relative insignificance, our like-it-or-not interconnectedness, Klink reminds us, is not such a bad thing to feel."
"If I could say in rhetorical language—like how we’re speaking to each other now—what I actually mean when I say 'God,' when I say 'grace,' when I say 'dead,' when I say 'justice,' I wouldn’t need the poems. I could just write brochures. The poems illuminate what my intelligence, my ego, cannot."
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