Among this weekend's reading, I recommend Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. It is more in prose than in poetry. Writing that moves between personal stories of relations with others and also the news moving into it. I really loved it. It is quiet. And it isn't like other things I've read recently. I think it is trying to go someplace else.

This at the end struck me...

Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different than a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem--is how Rosmarie Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that--Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive. p. 130

Also want to make note that she does an interesting annotation system at the back of the book that Dennis and Aimee and others who are writing poems with deep histories and references and allusions might want to check out.