Love Threads

Love Threads can be a painful book because it is about a hurtful relationship, but more important, it is a clear call to love and to love even when there is difficulty. A clear call to love spiritually and in body. It is essentially a transcendent calling, an ecstatic one—and a genuine journey of love.

These are poems whose obscurity win their way graciously with resonances that wistfully suggest sweetness and light without identifying many specifics or concrete manifestations of the sacred other. These poems make up invocations that appeal through the plausible and very humane nexus of dream, or vision, and longing. Continual hope for something solid that never appears or makes itself known in features that are not quite enough to satisfy a strong undercurrent of almost ambiguous desire. The poet makes clear his romantic trajectory in the early poems. It is not long before most readers will know where they are, as long as we are amenable to some real ambiguities of image and style. The title, “Beta” of the opening poem, seems to denote, as in physics, a variable, the speaker’s other coruscating from the first words of the book.

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The secrets of the ultimate temple of old Israel, radical, personal renewing in this world, a glass house, another garden, even a revisiting of Tao—the windup poems of this collection pull toward a general summation of spirit. . . . The world is as it has been in the rest of the book, but it is rather left behind—caught up in greater concerns. In some sense, these more expansive spiritual realms are also higher than the dear but desperate strife of the journey of the troubled relationship itself. They are the Alpha from which the entire journey begins. And where it ends.

Alan Naslund, author of Silk Weather

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