Each of the pieces in this volume are infused with intellectual precision, hard-won wisdom, and a hand that can capture exactly what she wants to say the way she means to say it poetically, and yet she makes it all look very easy.
It’s not.
There isn’t a poem in here I am capable of writing, even if you gave me the first line. – Scott Woods
Excerpt
How He Said It
He didn’t seem to like to
eat and that woman did.
She ate eggs, butter,
toast like every grain
made song on her tongue.
She’d say, “If you
put on sauce,
he would carefully
scrape it off.”
Did I know
what their marriage was really like?
I thought, how
could he do that
to her food? A dismantling.
Worse than saying no.
Then, in the ICU,
after emphysema popped
all the strength from his
lungs, made his
body hollow, though with no wind
to sing or talk —
when he coughed up brown
mucus — when he thought himself a small boy again —
he tried to eat
for her.
The Jello slipped right out
of his mouth.
Accolades
““- Alexis_Rueal
““- Brandy Roberts
About Louise
“You won’t know this, but I’ve done a lot of work in the realm of language poetry. I am most proud that people don’t think of my language poems as such. They are too busy experiencing the poem rather than the device.“
