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Forsythia spills over fences
in Connecticut:
                                the rest remains bare.
Survivors light candles, sulphur
from the match curling
                              around their heads.
A cantor sings Kaddish as much for the living
                              as the dead.
We have put on our good clothes.
We have driven through the pleasant country
                              to take our seats on a stage.
I listen to the audience: am I someone
singing to himself
                              to make silence less?
Or rouse a voice where there is none,
and, nothing myself, resurrect
                               the living from the dead.

 (originally published in Notre Dame Review and included in my collection, Evidence of Things Seen)

A new book, The Wild Language of Deer, by my friend and colleague Susan Glass is now available to order at Slate Roof Press. The press produces art-quality books with letterpress covers crafted by member and award-winning printer, Ed Rayher. Susan’s collection also features a braille pull-out of one of the poems.

“Winner of the Slate Roof Press Chapbook Award, The Wild Language of Deer reveals an impassioned sense of belonging, both to the world of here and now, but also to a fluid, echoing, mythical world out of time. Out of these pages come the stamping deer, the singing birds, the fingertips running over Braille and flute keys.”

My long poem, “The Apotheosis of Martín Ramírez,” may be found in the new volume of The American Journal of Poetry (Vol. 12, Jan. 2022). Ramírez was an outsider artist who made his beautiful art while while confined in a mental hospital in California.

http://www.theamericanjournalofpoetry.com/v12-wollman.html