Today, I received a very thick envelope containing my contributor’s copies of the latest issue of The Bennington Review, which is a stunning publication. On the back of the issue, there’s an immense list of all the contributors, including many poets whose work I’ve long loved: John Gallaher, David Roderick, Mary Jo Salter, Will Schutt, and Matthew Thorburn, to name just a few. What a treat to be part of such an all-star lineup.

I have two poems in the issue, “Persistent Effusion” and “Sonnet, Exiled.” Both pieces come from one of my current in-progress manuscripts, The Brief Temple Taken Down, a book that’s about the relationship between the health of the body and the health of the body politic. I’ve been working on this manuscript for about three years now, really taking my time with the poems and allowing the project to come together slowly and organically. I think the collection  is done. I’ll be sad to leave these poems behind after spending so many months with them.

But I suppose that’s how it always is with this process of putting together a manuscript. We come to know these poems so well that sometimes they follow us into sleep or else they greet us in the morning. They’re our companions, the chiming voices in our heads. And then we let them go when we finish the book. Often, when I come back to a poetry project during the production stage, I’m startled by what I find in my words. How unfamiliar they seem! Is it possible that I was ever the person who wrote these lines? It’s like encountering an earlier, estranged self.

In any case, if you want to learn more about The Bennington Review, you can visit the journal’s website here.