Poetry. Illustrated by Donatella D'Angelo. Daily life and monumental changes, diet colas and chocolate cake, writing projects and road trips. DRAWING THE SHADE captures, in Beat-inflected seat-of-yr-pants phrases and observations, snippets of phone conversations, and thumbnail sketches of profound relationships, a vivid commitment to poetry as a way of life. Rothenberg’s journey from the Bay Area to Miami, from attending to poetry goddess Joanne Kyger to tending to his own dying mother, takes on the poetic pulse of the most well-known epics while retaining the poignant charm of the quotidian, the unexceptional, the internal flow of language that is the seam between doing and thinking.–Maria Damon