Phan, Kevin, authorThe Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, publisher2020-12-142020-12-142020https://hdl.handle.net/10217/218275The prose poetry in Kevin Phan's first collection, Dears, Beloveds, offers a fine-grained meditation on grief-personal, familial, ecological, and political. Informed by the author's engagement with Buddhism & mindfulness, the poems address looming absences: in our vanishing earth, the scraps of a haunting voicemail, or waiting at hospice with little to do. In these pages, the poet fights his way out of isolation, to establish filigrees of connectedness with himself, other humans, and the natural world. Whether meditating on the bodily loss of his cancer-stricken mother, the Black Lives Matter movement, or a shadow falling from a speck of dust in the kitchen, these lines are notable for their crisp and surprising movements, lucid imagery, aching tenderness, & humanity. Dears, Beloveds reminds us of the ironies, beauty, and complexity of our time on earth, as beings in time. Where we hurt. Where we heal each other.--Provided by publisher.[Outside the snapdragons, cords of light] -- [Floating sheep turn to wonder] -- [I pass through the mental hospital] -- [To witness a selkie, owl-grandmother, grief] -- [For each today, I'll let my soul-force lead] -- [Eternal waves quarrel at the bottom of a wellfull of blueness] -- [Sweet jumping Jesus, bright flocks of rain!] -- [Beneath dark purples, new life jockeying through the cracks] -- [What brought us from the ocean into diamond Buddhafields?] -- [Kombucha & skincare] -- [Here's the church, here's the steeple] -- [I walk past the mental hospital] -- [Dappled eggs in space. Chickens scratch constellations into blues] -- [Hello Tuesday, soul-power pancakes] -- [The things we carry-what to do?] -- [Pigs in space, bacon-colored, sprouting wings] -- [Childhood's sweet, rotten gospel] -- [My whole house sweats blood] -- [In the documentary on Aleppo] -- [Grief flowers new dimensions] -- [My neighbor reshingles his roof] -- [What fool denies the inner life of a whale?] -- [Masters from my spiritual tradition became so still] -- [In last night's dream, I collected my dead mother] -- [At the Oldorf Hospice House of Mercy] -- [I now intensely cultivate universal love] -- [My heart continues to digest mother's broken grammar] -- [Into each pore, we ask the world in] -- ["Every word," wrote Beckett, "is like an unnecessary stain"] -- [Animals & stars were never ours to hold] -- [What would it mean, never to be brought into being?] -- [Can we love life enough to anguish at its loss?] -- [Our sky of sudden hail] -- [Our White Helmets tranced by the blast] -- [Our Declaration of Interdependence] -- [In the multiverse, other versions of ourselves] -- [& When I arrived at my mother's deathbed] -- [Seas & stars were never ours to hold dominion over] -- [Myths, a script of gifts for the living] -- [In every life, a moment or 2, for heaven's sake] -- [Among artists frozen into snowbanks] -- [Yes. Hours brighten into months] -- [Can you hear them?] -- [We travel to our shipping address, like all things] -- [We who boil in space] -- [So we traveled hand in hand through time] -- [We who open into prayer] -- [Just as time erases kisses from my body] -- [Everything's just 1 insight] -- [What if love is just spondees] -- [We compassion] -- [We command assertions of value] -- [Confession] -- [Mother, I've built a hospital] -- [Raw honey sun] -- [Said simply] -- [Imagine meditations on meditation] -- [Sprouted splinter fevers] -- [Everything priests promised was eternal] -- [I didn't even get the chance to kiss you goodbye] -- [I didn't even get the chance to kiss you goodbye] -- [Do you believe in magic?] -- ["Suffering is part of the divine idea."] -- [Said simply] -- [I drank the whole alphabet of grief. Then held a blood orange] -- [Brothers, sisters, impossible to say] -- [Dears. Beloveds] -- [Closing waves].born digitalbooksengCopyright and other restrictions may apply. User is responsible for compliance with all applicable laws. For information about copyright law, please see https://libguides.colostate.edu/copyright.All rights reserved. User is responsible for compliance. Please contact The Center for Literary Publishing, attn: Permissions at creview@colostate.edu for use information.Grief -- PoetryPoetryTextAccess is limited to the Adams State University, Colorado School of Mines, Colorado State University, Colorado State University Pueblo, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Colorado Colorado Springs, University of Colorado Denver, University of Denver, University of Northern Colorado, University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and Western Colorado University members only.