A Man Made of Stories

Some stories are our own, some are heard from others, and some are stories we imagine. The poems in A Man Made of Stories embrace them all. Whether traveling by train through the Ozarks, walking under the orange trees and bougainvillea of Las Dueñas in Seville, or listening to Pavarotti in a laundromat on the Upper West Side in New York City, they take the reader on journeys through experiences that shape both the literal self-born on one date, dead on another-and the imagined self that continues in the lines of a poem. At the old Roman wall in Barcelona, where merchants left marks from sharpening their knives for hundreds of years, the poet asks, "are we / The stone shaped by so many knives, or / Are we the knives sharpened by stone?" These poems celebrate what has been lost and what remains, whether it is the beauty of aging bodies, the nobility of the animals left behind by Noah, or simply time spent talking over a glass of wine. They find their value in the finite, in this all-too-mortal world we inhabit and cherish without guarantees or faith, except perhaps that "the world is sayable" and that we can find a home in our daily lives together "in the way / Our hands touch involuntarily as we talk, / How we look at each other as we carry / The leftovers to the refrigerator and / Our dishes out to the sink."