love/empathy/poetry

split my skin

with the rock

of love old

as the rock

of Moses

my poems

love you

i thought it was great that "genesis" opens up the collection. this preface poem that introduces the rest of the book is both rough and inviting and calls attention to how grueling the process of poetry is. it is an unveiling, a molting, a shedding, a splitting open of memory, your body, your timeline. poetry isn't easy. writing it means excavating and breaking yourself open, reaching into recesses to make something precious, valuable, healing out of experiences--positive, negative, personal, historical. he points to this in this poem, with describing his skin splitting from the rock of love. it is a process of love even when the subject matter is full of violence or entrapment. he sets up the collection as a space for love, letting readers know that his poems care for their readers. they may be "green... and sometimes / wrinkled or worn," aka not beautiful, they may be painful, violent, and act as a challenge (as many of his poems do challenge), making "the heel / of Adam & Eve / to bleed," but they are out of love--self-love, familial love, community love. his poems take different shapes and occupy many spaces. some are dense blocks, some skeletal with short-lines with a lot of space to breathe. 

 as important and warm as love can be, it is also violent, subject to change, sometimes ugly, sometimes impossible. he points to these multiplicities in this poem by his language and word choices "wrinkled," "split," "bleed," "rock." this isn't a cutesy poem and his poems aren't warm and fuzzy even if they do love us. they are an engagement with the reader. they get up close to readers to make them feel and see. the subjects of his poems vary and often deal with really rough subjects--a contemplation on his sister's sex work, being in prison, suicide, violence and death, losing love, etc. they aren't all tender poems, sometimes they are very tough, but they do all come out of a tenderness and sensitivity to these realities, and many of these poems are rooted in deep empathy.