When my big brother Joe died two years ago at age sixty-three, alone on his bedroom floor in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, he had more than sixty tattoos on his body but no teeth. Years of anxious clenching ...
Late in his career, the English poet W. H. Auden distilled the whole business of poetry into three pungent lines: “A poet’s hope: to be, / like some valley cheese, / local, but prized elsewhere.” ...