Perfect Hurt

A finalist for both the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and the Donald Justice Book Prize.Last SongWe are nothing but the stories that we tell.We are all the people that we''ll never know.We are oceans, echoed in a shell.We are the barren harvests that we sow.You''d think that I''d be sick of all these sawsby now. I am. But if I had my druthersI would die to grow sick of more becausewe''re all dying – and some faster than others.Our heaven is here, our hell is here, and love –the bleeding angel of no soul – is here.It flaps its broken wing, it hangs aboveour ground, it whispers in our grave''s dirt earone name that we forget before it roles, divesvanishing beneath the soil of our lives.Stunning first book from one of Waywiser''s most compelling younger poetsAn old artist looks back at a century that almost killed him while yet turning him into the creator he was destined to become. Lovers pull down a tree to discover the life inside dead, dry bark. Through their exhilarating techniques, their adamant attachments to art and to nature, their sharp observations and their wry senses of humour, these poems re-imagine suffering and memory as what anchor us to the world – and what render that world, amazingly, worth surviving.