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IF IT'S DARKNESS WE'RE HAVING, LET IT BE EXTRAVAGANT

The Jane Kenyon Erasure Poems by Ahrend Torrey

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“The Jane Kenyon Erasure Poems by Ahrend Torrey invites us into a world of pondering about the creative process. Of juxtaposition and balance. … We find ourselves in a story of humid primal earth and man. A story of choice of perception. In the second section of the book (the text isolated from the erasure images), we read this story in its new incarnation and experience the meditations on mind, sexuality, flowers and sky, darkness and uncertainty.

These poems ask us to question the curtains that we took as certainties. Days and nights. Words and no-words. Guided by scents and an almost spiritual companion of a dog throughout, Ahrend Torrey once again brings us the light and the dark, the dis-ease and the hope. Drawing his respect for Jane Kenyon’s work into his and our imaginations: dark red veins rich with memory and forgetting.”

—Susan Entsminger, from The Sources and Courses of Images, Words, and Ideas

Ahrend Torrey is the author of For What Are the Blossoms Reaching? (Limited Edition, Pinyon Publishing, 2023), Ripples (Pinyon Publishing, 2023), Bird City, American Eye (Pinyon Publishing, 2022), and Small Blue Harbor (Poetry Box Select, 2019). His work has appeared in storySouth, The Greensboro Review, and The Perch (a journal of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health, a program of the Yale School of Medicine), among others. He earned his MA/MFA in creative writing from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and is a recipient of the Etruscan Prize awarded by Etruscan Press. He lives in Chicago with his husband, Jonathan; their two rat terriers, Dichter and Dova; and Purl, their cat.

Bird City, American Eye: