We are all, in this pandemic, a living elegy; there are loves, possibilities, selves, ways of life that are dead, a mobile mortality poets have always known and used their art to reckon with, fool around with, and renovate: enter ghosts, memories, and Wordsworthian “spots of time.” Enter Joshua Rivkin’s abashedly self-conscious and evocative, capacious yet taut lyricism, which constructs desire as the cornerstone of autobiographical poetry. Restlessness may well be the character motivation or backstory underlying the experiences that give rise to poetic expression; it is also the subject matter underlying artistic representations of family and sexual histories…
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