I got a bee in my bonnet over the last weekend of October. One could argue, adroitly, that I was avoiding doing other things, but I think putting together 90% of this book over 2 days counts as being productive. I went through old hard drives, notebooks, and the web to find all the poetry I’ve written. It’s not a lot, about 60 or so, but it was fun looking for them and revisiting some I’d not thought about for a few decades. This book is sort of a “collected works” edition. Some of the poems I’ve worked hard on and some of them were written in less than a minute. I think I tend to like those the best. There are one or two that I set out to do something very specific and I think I accomplished that. Could they all be better? Of course. Getting through the final 10% took another month. Are any of them great? One is. I could work for another 30 years on some of these—that’s how poetry goes. But at some point, to steal a phrase from dayjob-land, you gotta ship it. This book is a word temple. At least, it wants to be. I hope you like the book you are about to read, even if it isn’t this one.