Reflections on ANOTHER SUNSET WE SURVIVE

To be a dangerous writer is to write about the things that scare you, to write stuff that is too scary for others to write.  By writing these things, you can give the reader a gift, one of intimacy, one of permission.  I want the book to be such a gift.

When I’ve read my own dangerous writing on topics like sex, incest, and violence to my students or to a room full of strangers, I’ve felt their pity and scorn and sometimes, their relief.  Publishing a book of poems is very different and has caught me off guard.

The poems in this collection span two decades.  The crown of sonnets tortured my mentor in graduate school, Colleen McElroy, while she helped me ratchet them down to twists of language.  She also helped me find a voice that wasn’t just soft and melodic.  Through her insistence, through reading writers like Marilyn Hacker, Adrienne Rich, and Dylan Thomas, I learned to make the words do what they said.  That’s the idea behind the whole book: to do what we know, to give the sound of sense, to choose.

My practice of writing is not unlike that of other poets.  When I sit down to write, the sun is usually coming up.  My dog is under my desk, curled up and snoring.  When I write about my family, they are far away, 3000 miles away, tucked in their New England lives.

But now after Cedar House released ANOTHER SUNSET WE SURVIVE, my family can hold the poems in their hands.  They know that other people may recognize the situation of the poem, and they can read the feeling I had when I labored over the words.  Suddenly, their pity and scorn are scary to me.  Publishing a book of poems is one of the scariest things I’ve done.

But working with Gary and Linda at Cedar House Books on this book has been one of the most rewarding things.  They are amazing editors, scrutinizing every image, every word.  They taught me about the flow of poems, the discipline needed not to skip an image you slipped in because at the time it seemed perfect, the way that blank pages make room for echoes.  They’ve been generous, good-humored, and firm.  This book has been a gift.

I hope these poems show you that you are not alone, that there is someone in the Northwest who tries every morning to say what really happened to her family, what really happens in disasters and distant lands, to say that you too can do what you need to do.  I hope you will know what Viktor Frankl wrote, “What is to give light must endure burning.”

You are light, and this book is for you.