“This will cool you down like nothing will, but when we add it all up, you’re the one who missed me. And now you come to tell me all about your sadness.”
“Again the full moon climbs, precisely on time.
What else would it do? A shame that as it floats
it doesn’t spark interior commotion.
Or perhaps it does in its way. What it produces
is no less familiar, though, than moonlight on snow.”
“It was late, dark, cold October;
I unrolled poncho and sleeping bag,
and by morning my weight had melted
some frozen cowpies.”
“But if a self-centered person walked in she might see only what she was in the mood to see: a pleasing nose or lip or Brooks Brothers suit, a plate of oily greens with pignoli and golden raisins. Suppose a waiter steps forward with a single red rose. He’s just doing his job with that extra special customer service touch, but she’s thinking, What can he possibly want? Does he not know I detest red roses?”
“Coo at both until it’s not a gate; it’s a harp strung with your hair. Play // a distant song, or a song, at least, of distance.”
“she had been /
gone two weeks on a banana boat to Panama and so /
the boat I waited for was yellow and filled with bananas. . . .”
“My path lies neither nor,
triumph nor defeat, lazing off a rubber Zodiac to skin-dive down
the pinnacles of Silver Bank, plunge up the abyss of coral-heads,
rubbed by the weaving rainbow-nets of angelfish, wrasses, tangs.”
A review of David Shields’s Reality Hunger, by Thomas Larson
“What I think Shields should articulate is simple: ‘literal truth’ does not exist. As a result, there’s no sense in his being categorical, claiming that fiction denies the true and nonfiction embraces it. It leads to further contradiction.”
“My work is what you might call whatever—
‘Whatever sells the pies,’ my boss says.”
“What I can’t understand is /
who has the energy to be a xenophobe at seven in the morning.”
A review of Darwish’s If I Were Another, by Jeannie Vanasco
“He was the Arab world’s bestselling poet. Twenty-five thousand gathered in Beirut to hear him speak. How did he accomplish this? I have no definitive answer. What I do know is he spent most of his life writing poetry of resistance, in and out of jail between nighttime house arrests, in flight from one village to the next, until the heart surgery that would end his life.”
“all that tribe, /
heard as from a height /
in clamorous babble, /
except something emerges, /
almost a word. . . .”
Te Fuiste Sin Siquiera Despedirte 
Poet of Resistance: Mahmoud Darwish, 1941–2008