Böcker av Julie Choffel

Dear Wallace addresses the poet and insurance executive Wallace Stevens in an attempt to reconsider art, power, and creativity amid the demands of the everyday.

Like the best songs, Julie Choffel's The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love is a poem fueled by desire. To have "so many / ways to say I want" is dangerous and selfish, we've heard: we should be content; we should be grateful. But "women are never / not hungry," Choffel's mother-speaker insists, aware that her life plays out as two tracks in the same song-the material world of meals and routines as well as the imaginative realm. Poetry is this "parallel universe," these "other zones," this "floor / under the garbage," these subterranean places where we meet to tend to different hungers. In Choffel's hands, these spaces bloom with deep seeing and wry humor: "there I go / again trying to liberate us from what we don't know." The poem becomes a vehicle for satisfying its own longings, a gift then passed along to us as readers-so that we, too, might dance to such a soundtrack in our kitchens and in the otherworlds that envelop the everyday. If you're willing to risk being brought back to your own desires, enter The Inevitable Return.-Becca Klaver

This text explores themes of familiarity and strangeness, asking the reader to consider the differences between them and where they overlap. Sampling from all forms of communication, the author implores us to greet the unknown and to listen in turn.