On Saturday night, while jumping out of my seat to let someone squeeze past me at Radio City Music Hall, I spilled my red wine on the stranger seated next to me. Just sloshed it right across his knees, onto his jeans. Big dark stains, visible even in the dim light. World’s most embarrassing party foul.
He forcefully and repeatedly assured me it was fine, no problem at all, they were old jeans he was going to throw out anyhow — thank you, kind stranger — but as we sat back down, I was equal parts horrified and elated. Horrified, because that’s just a rookie mistake. Elated, because, well, put yourself in my shoes: I spilled wine on the stranger in the seat next to mine. At Radio City Music Hall. I was close enough to someone else to spill wine on them, and I was drinking wine, and we were in one of the world’s most famous concert venues, the most capacious in New York City. Packed to the gills, everyone vaccinated. Ready to see a movie (and a concert, though we didn’t know that part yet).
Yours Presently depicts the harrowing life of an artist in a country that has always been indifferent to its artists, teases out the networks of affinity that form the ecologies in which such artists survive, and furnishes essential insights into the conditions from which poetry arises. As Robert Dewhurst has written, it’s a watershed, and a gift to all those who “burn in the memory of love.”
The movement of the book is essentially a panicked ricochet: how the choices the characters make force choices on other people.
Along my hospitable hall
I hear tongues speaking in people —
a kind and suffering, jumbled
and scared, multilingual choral
improvisation. From my bed,