Answer the Door

Choose one or the other, demands the light. / Choose both, says the dark. ANSWER THE DOOR votes with the dark and its predilection for paradox and possibility. These poems invite readers into a world populated by imaginary friends, 1950s television icons, inmates at a county prison, lead pirates, plastic knights, a Sunday school class and Jesus’s secret lover, Quintilian and Oneal Moore, Salome and Deborah Kerr, Pixie the Dog and a cat named Schroedinger. The book is grounded in the resonant particulars of our daily lives and in the longings that inform them; it puts its faith in the mysteries inherent in these lives and in these longings. It trusts in language’s insatiable hungers. It argues for a justice inseparable from compassion and a beauty inextricable from loss. It is grateful for the hard work of propositions to keep us rooted in time and place.