Promises

I think these poems are pretty wonderful. They feel like the inside of rapture and defeat, but they are dark and swerve a lot, which are things I do not associate with rapture, and that interests me. I like the mixture of lusty and yeasty, along with a kind of innocence that seems attached to receptivity and light. And I like the astonishment that feels unlike any contemporary poetry I know: the voice, while not archaic or dated in the least, seems to come out of some earlier time.

What do we look for in poetry? For my part, I know that I want emotional authenticity, integrity with respect to truth, and a backlog of experience that brings wealth and weight to the language. Ray Amorosi has given us a book that satisfies these desires amply, again and again, surprising us with its fierce rightness, its dark humor, its fundamental humanity.