In this luminous collection, a poet confronts illness, loss, and the inexorable passage of time. Opening with "Prayer," an urgent invocation that braids medical precision with erotic tenderness, the book moves through five sections exploring how beloved presences dissolve into memory, landscape, and the natural world.
With extraordinary formal range — from compressed lyrics to expansive meditations like the sequence "Eight Waterscapes" — these poems employ remarkable intelligence to hold sorrow within aesthetic structure. Whether photographing winter shadows or contemplating waters where ashes have dispersed, the speaker seeks patterns of meaning where technical control becomes a way of negotiating with grief. If the dead are "everywhere we are," then memory becomes ubiquity, and verse a dwelling place where loss and presence coexist.
Don Bogen is the author of six books of poems, including Immediate Song (Milkweed, 2019) and An Algebra (Chicago, 2009), along with a book on Theodore Roethke and a translation of selected poems by the contemporary Spanish poet Julio Martínez Mesanza. He has collaborated with composers from the U.S and abroad. Prizes for his work include a Discovery Award, the Emily Dickinson Award of the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Camargo Foundation. He has held Fulbright positions at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast and at the Universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo in Spain. Nathaniel Ropes Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati, he serves as editor-at-large of The Cincinnati Review and lives in Martinez, California.
