Dear You: A Memoir with Poems by Wade Stevenson

I enjoyed reading DEAR YOU. I admire how the poems pop off the page with a stinging emotional power. HER BREATH IS NOT MINE is a great way to begin this book. You manage to make a poetics of the body. Oriented and focused on the flesh as a metaphor of the distance between the ghost inside the skeleton that is longing to touch but never actually getting to do more than simply migrating from love to lover. The yearning expressed, the circle of wanting and waiting, the loss of a wife who no doubt will not return, the possible loss of a daughter, is a clear universal feeling. Your lines “It’s while she’s asleep that my rage/ builds to a fiery crescendo that has no place to go,” get a gold star. Other poems are a magnificent description of the distance that grief encompasses. The idea that you could stop your own breathing also gets a gold star, just as does the follow-up line, “I am an expert at touching things for the last time.” The final poems call on the goal of peace and understanding, perhaps to be found “in the light that’s left behind.”

—Geoffrey Gatza, author of “Apollo” and “The House of Forgetting”

Wade Stevenson was born in New York City in 1945. He is the author of several books of poetry, a memoir “One Time in Paris,” and a novel “The Electric Affinities.”

Book Information:

· Paperback: 68 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-224-2