Successive Approximations

First and foremost, we hold in our hands a meditation on language: the name that never becomes one's own, the bond between reality and the words with which we try to grasp and configure it. Perhaps the object or end of these approximations is less important than the movement that occasions and stimulates them. The title that encompasses this set of poems is therefore apt: approaches to and from a word that questions, doubts, and is sometimes quite skeptical. The force that moves this poetry is not, seemingly, the possibility of revelation or encounter, but rather approaches, closenesses that heighten "the power of longing."
-Gabriela Kizer