I got Ann Patchett’s annotated Bel Canto for Christmas & I wish there were more books w author annotations!! It’s her own handwritten notes looking back at the book 30 years later or so. I love that she still writes things like “Ack! This is terrible” or “too many adverbs” in between “lovely.”

Sarajevo, 2005

“The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and young, the past and present, the living and the dead.” —from One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you down so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time.” —Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

“But it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.” —Gilead by Marilyn Robinson

“I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face…It has something to do with incarnation…Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it” -Gilead, Marilyn Robinson.

I’m thrilled to have 2 poems, “Troubled” and “Squib,”appear in this beautiful issue of the Cimarron Review! I love the cover art and so many great contributors. Many thanks to the editors!

Have you all read Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson? I love this odd monster of a book. It’s so wonderfully weird. I wish I could have a book group to talk about it! Maybe I’ll start one. I could put up posters in town inviting people to read it with me.

Here’s my shadow and a stranger’s shadow in the rain room at LACMA. It was raining all around us but not on us. Magical.

My hope is that this space will be somewhere I can reconnect with poets and celebrate their work while also coming out of my own poetry shell again. I’ve missed the poets! Follow me please and I’ll follow you back.

Lapsang souchong tea and Moomin mug. Agnès attacking my fuzzy-socked foot in the sun. Thanksgiving break begins!