Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals in which these poems, sometimes in an earlier version, first appeared:
Conduit: “Louise,” “Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be,” “Too Late, Louise Said, Means,” and “What Is a Mouth?”;
Denver Quarterly: “Ritual Gestures” and “They Were That and Then”;
Fence: “The Dog Bark”;
Gettysburg Review: “The Ana of Bliss”;
Harvard Review: “That Was All, Louise Said, Except For”;
Jacket: “The Diary of a Lost Girl,” “The Penguin Chiaroscuro,” “The Medicinal Cotton Clouds Come Down to Cover Them,” “Dark Smudged the Path Untrammeled,” and “A Hurricranium, He Said”;
Kenyon Review: “Travel Is Easy by Train,” “Kiss, Kiss, Said Louise, by Way of a Pay Phone,” and “Does Mrs. Hunt Tear Linen Straight as Ever?”;
New American Writing: “A Cake of Nineteen Slices” and “Louise Sighs, Such a Long Winter, This”;
The New Republic: “Like a Fire in a Fire” and “Time Speeds, Said Louise, When a Fever Rises”;
The New Yorker: “The Star’s Whole Secret”;
Paris Review: “She Couldn’t Sing At All, At All,” “So This,” and “The Still Knife Still Suspended”; Partisan Review: “Night Falling Fast”;
Ploughshares: “Ham Paints a Picture to Illustrate an Early Lesson: O Trauma!”; Poetry Review: “To Savor the Sequel” and “Etched, Tetched, Touched”; Slope: “In the Quieter Aftermath”;
TriQuarterly: “Here’s a Fine Word: Prettiplease” and “The Raven Feeds Reynard”;
Verse: “Belle Vue” and “Enchained”;
Yale Review: “Night and Nail.”
“The Dog Bark,” “Like a Fire in a Fire,” “Louise in Love,” and “The Star’s Whole Secret” appeared in The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Michael Collier, ed. (University Press of New England, 2000).
Many of these poems were written during a period of residency at Princeton University made possible by a Hodder Fellowship awarded by the Council for the Humanities, for which I am extremely grateful. Thanks are also owed to The Corporation of Yaddo and to the Chateau Lavigny for residencies. For suggestions and encouragement along the way, many thanks to Stephen Burt, Claudia Rankine, Monica de la Torre, Mac Wellman, and Mark Wunderlich. And special (and eternal) thanks to Richard Howard for his confidence in my work. “Ham Paints a Picture to Illustrate an Early Lesson: O Trauma!” is for Michael Van Hook.
The italicized lines in “Does Mrs. Hunt Tear Linen Straight as Ever?” come from letters of John Keats [to his brothers (15 April 1817); to Leigh Hunt (10 May 1817)]. The italicized lines in “That Was All, Louise Said, Except For” come from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The italicized lines in “And No Sign Will Mark the Midpoint’s Passing” are adapted from an incantation to the Babylonian goddess, Ishtar. “Night and Nail” contains deliberate, but slanted, echoes of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” “Enchained” borrows the phrase “Much have I travell’d” from Keats’s “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” The italicized lines in “Raptured” come from Book II of Keats’s “Hyperion: A Fragment.” The italicized lines in “Interrupted Briefly by a Borrowed Phrase, the Scene Proceeds” come from Book I of Keats’s “Hyperion: A Fragment.”