Don't Do It, We Love You, My Heart

(Paperback)

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In a wide range of lyrically rich poems, award-winning poet Jonathan Fink interrogates the perpetual mysteries and resonances at the convergence of national identity, historical influence, and personal experience.

In Don't Do It-We Love You, My Heart, Jonathan Fink interweaves a welcome range of poetic styles including expansive, narrative poems, shorter, lyrical poems, and intricate one-sentence poems that are sustained over multiple pages to deliver his most intimate collection to date. Charting changing national and personal landscapes, Fink's writing explores such diverse subjects as growing up in West Texas at the conclusion of the Cold War; ekphrastic poems about the paintings of Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art theft; the intuitive language he shares with his infant daughter on a quiet evening before she falls asleep; and the famous story of a suicide prevented on the George Washington Bridge-the jumper stayed by the man who tells him, "Don't do itwe love you, my heart." The imperative, urgent compassion conveyed in the stranger's command thrums through all the poems in this collection, compelling the reader outward to deeper connections and lived empathy.

Reviews

Jonathan skillfully grapples with thematic material engaging larger social and political implications without sacrificing precision of language, clarity, and the quest for beauty that characterizes all of his work. From the introduction toThe Crossingby Natasha Trethewey, United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry 2012-2014

Hes a better guide than Dante had through our hells and heavens. Mary Karr, author ofThe Liars Club andLit

The threads Fink weaves between worlds past and present, real and fantasized, are as palpable as they are prescient. Shelf Awareness(starred review)

Jonathan Fink pours his stories onto the page. Personal pieces, with himself as the subject, and pieces that tell the stories of others come together to form a collection of intelligent poems, both revealing of the individual self and the larger social picture in which we live. World Literature Today

Author Bio

Jonathan Fink is Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at University of West Florida. He has published two books of poetry: The Crossing (Dzanc, 2015) and Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad (Dzanc, 2016). His third book, a hybrid poetry/nonfiction collection, is forthcoming from Dzanc. He has also received the Editors Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review, the McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for Nonfiction/Essay from Southwest Review, the Porter Fleming Award in Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Joshua Tree National Park, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and Emory University, among other institutions. His poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, Narrative, New England Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, and Witness, among other journals.