Allow Me

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)>Since receiving her first / rejection slip at the age of ten through her father's dismissal of women writers Irene Willis has written past his disapproval learning / my mother's language and drawing on the lives of both parents to craft memorable poems on gender ageing and mortality. As she acknowledges with wistfulness and humor my own end near she considers the word deceased: I'm writing this / after names / in my address book. / It's better than / crossing them out and recalls a poet who paid homage to her dog / by tasting its ashes. In poems praised previously by Maxine Kumin and Alicia Ostriker Irene Willis conveys a life rich in its ordinariness and extraordinary in its loves. Through the decades-long making of these poems that ten-year-old has come to recognize that her mind was hers and hers alone.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)>-Michael Waters</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)>Michael Waters has been called one of the best American poets writing today praised for his pleasure in the figurative and musical possibilities of language. His latest book is </span><em style=background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)>Caw;</em><span style=background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)> others are </span><em style=background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)>Celestial Joyride Gospel Night Darling Vulgarity and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems.</em><span style=background-color: rgba(247 247 247 1); color: rgba(102 102 102 1)> He has received five Pushcart prizes and many other awards and fellowships for his work.</span></p>