ELEVATOR PITCH for my new book-length, professionally edited manuscript of poems in search of a publishing contract—-
BREATH DEBT is about my keen sense of indebtedness to the airborne voices, songs, and gestures of other human beings. It is also about suffocation—my yearning for physical and emotional resuscitation.
Among the fifty-four lyric poems in this manuscript is a tribute to my father who died from pulmonary disease; a portrait of a gym coach who cheerfully forgave my incapacities; remembrances of my mother, whose last living breath I witnessed; and an elliptical, meditative series of sighful exchanges between me and my overgrown weeds.
Most of these poems begin with a quick inhalation, then expire easily and audibly down the page, emptying into the weightlessness of metaphor. As a writer indebted to Robert Frost (among many others), I purposefully shaped each of these poems to “ride on its own melting”—the melting of a single, momentary breath.
NOTE: from “The Figure a Poem Makes” by Robert Frost: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”
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