My Second Work

I want to begin with the admission that Bridget Lowe is a dear friend. One of the five poets in my MFA workshop, I learned to read and write poems at her side. Hers were the ears I most trusted. Hers the poems I wished I had written, thorned with serifs and shining. Among many, many other things, she taught me that poems are portals of contact, of connection, between the living and the dead, the present and the past, the inside and the outside. Hearts and brains and guts and eyes.

The poems in her collection, My Second Work, marvel at the grotesque, the abject, with a language that is forensic, singular, naked, and unafraid. They refuse neat endings, false resolutions, regurgitated arcs of redemption and instead wade into the sick, the sad, the shame where a feral and weird beauty thrives, like the radiotrophic fungus feeding inside the contamination radius ringing Chernobyl: “My chain, my chain, its golden links/ can split one sun into millions of suns. My head/ is a planet, a golden planet, full// of love I don’t understand.”

There is a bald longing and budding metaphysics here that feels like both the beginning and ending of me. “I once was blind and then I got blinder/ and then—then—I could see.”