Things We Might Miss

<p>The poems in Things We Might Miss play with two main aspects of missing: experiencing loss (or being deprived) and failing to see—aspects echoed in respectively the book's front and back cover photos. But instead of seeing missing as altogether negative the book praises it in one's affections as desirable—for example it's arguably a good thing to be able to miss someone and disagreeable to find a person's constant presence a form of browbeating or a state where “respect fades/in obliged nearness/into a sort of stupor.” Accordingly these poems reiterate how absence can and should be alluring. The themes of distance and positive tension between people pick up on Kierkegaard's caution on total familiarity as well as author Philip Wylie's complaint “That's the trouble with love. People think it involves rights.”</p>