In Randall Watson’s The Geometry of Wishes, as much a subtle narrative sequence as it is a collection of lyrical meditations, an ecstatic generosity arises from an elegiac base, moving through our inescapable patterns of loss to emerge as an invocation of our mutuality, our tenderness. Refusing easy sentiment, these poems, resonant and limber, traverse the complexities of longing that beguile us, deepening our lives, giving them both gravity and lightness.

Teaching Myself to Read

I want to call it autopsia,

I want to call it aubade,

I want to call it tenderness, return:
in the flower’s throat the history of bees