A Much More Exciting Love


Because I believe, vaguely but surely, in a coming apocalypse, sometimes it is hard to convince readers that my poems' religiosity (think lifting of the veil) is not specific to a religion. Once a lovably deranged Englishman insisted that my poems, voice, and affect were so Marian that I might actually be the Virgin (distinctly impossible on one hand but not on another, in that I am yet a childless Jewess).

Many of my poems are about an apocalypse-not always an uncovering of Hell but sometimes just what is yet to happen. "Tired" and "The Only Thing to Pray For Is Fire" are fairly straightforward poems of anticipation. "Citation" and "Jupiter Has Sixty-One Moons," are more oblique, yet the rule-breaker and the Jovian painters insist on an imminent (and immanent) dérangement. "With, Within, Without" is a different kind of poem. Having begun as an attempt to see whether, instead of writing about the future, I could write about something that had already happened, it emerged, of course, as a conventional love poem. The apocalypse poems, in my opinion, are about a much more exciting love.