By Charles Rammelkamp
“we are what happens by accident,” Joshua Rivkin writes in the first “Envoi” of this lyrical, emotionally probing collection, and goes on:
Suitor, from the Latin secutor,
to follow. I can’t
catch them, or let them go —
So much of the poetry in this book is about desire, the Joie de Vivre it provides and the mistakes and tragedies it can cause. Or, as he writes in the second “Envoi” that bookends the collection, meditating on an orange peel “wound over the core of an apple —”:
imperfect as the marriage
of memory and desire.
Our bodies hunger
and can’t remember for what.