"I Tell You This Now" by Daniel Lawless [by Nin Andrews]

Family Photographs: My Brother, Solar Eclipse, 1965

In a year, Haldol, ECT, the closed gates of a sanitarium.
But for now—how happy you were. To be eleven and unconcerned
For once with school, the Cubs, who punched who.
For a few minutes to be unlearned, to be taught
A new world. O, distant boy, how marvelous
It all must have been, to be turned into a ghoul with your friends,
To spurn the murmur of grown-ups with their highballs and hair
On the deck for a lowering sky burned sepia, orange.
At three o’clock to feel yourself disappear inside yourself —
To cast no shadow. And – so long ago now
how did you put it? —the delicious, insistent thought
What if it stays like this? To yearn and yet not to know yet
What that yearning meant.

Thus begins Daniel Lawless' stunning new collection of intimate and profoundly moving poems. This is a book not to miss--each poem in it is painfully beautiful, darkly lit, familiar and startling. As Jim Daniels writes: The poems in I Tell You This Now evoke the photos of Diane Arbus in that they might make you want to turn away, but then only to turn back and go deeper, as he does, to find the humanity in this complex, difficult world. He mines photographs both real and imagined to create fresh, startling insights that sustain us, like the small daily joys of "... lumbering the cha-cha as she boiled the green out of Thursday cabbage." 

 

Comments

[Denise Duhamel]

This is an amazing book! I am loving it so much. Danny has dug deep to make these poems. Thank you for highlighting it, Nina!

[Terence Winch]

Terrific poem.

[Elena Karina Byrne]

BRILLIANT long awaited for collection of poems!

Thank you for this David
Elena

[Peter Johnson]

Yes, this book has been long-awaited. An authentic, raw voice so often lacking from American poetry.

[Elaine Sexton]

wondeful! can't wait to read the book! -Elaine