The Persistence of Longing

Named a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry as one of the best works by a northern California poet published in 2016I love these poems love how they sweep me along sweep me up into the arms of the kind of longing that seems unsayable untranslatable impossible to describe in any language with any words--the words turning back into breath as this poet says as she creates the sense of that longing itself in words in these sometimes-breathless lines sometimes against the restraint of form the sweet ache of rhyme creating that sense of urgency thats so like desire itself and the sense of danger that infuses even the deepest pleasure especially the deepest pleasure. Ive never read poems that seem to me more accurate about love and desire and sexual relationships and their almost-inevitable shattering--darkly gorgeous and expertly-crafted poems with a white-hot lyric intensity and a narrative pull that becomes cumulative an erotic veering toward doom. And yet the persistence of longing is the life force too refusing to exhaust itself: How could anything in the universe be undying / when everything rushed forward trailing light? --Cecilia Woloch author of Carpathia