Behind My Eyes: Poems

by Li-Young Lee

A highly anticipated collection from one of the most powerful voices at work in America today. Combining sensitivity and eloquence with a broad appeal, Li-Young Lee walks in the footsteps of Stanley Kunitz and Billy Collins as one of the United States’s most beloved poets. Playful, erotic, at times mysterious, his work describes the immanent value of everyday experience. Straightforward language and simple narratives become gateways to the most powerful formulations of beauty, wisdom, and divine love.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Literature, American, Asian American

144 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Li-Young Lee is an American poet. He was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His great-grandfather was Yuan Shikai, China's first Republican President, who attempted to make himself emperor. Lee's father, who was a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, relocated his family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. His father was exiled and spent a year in an Indonesian prison camp. In 1959 the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Li-Young Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport.

Lee attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he began to develop his love for writing. He had seen his father find his passion for ministry and as a result of his father reading to him and encouraging Lee to find his passion, Lee began to dive into the art of language. Lee’s writing has also been influenced by classic Chinese poets, Li Bo and Tu Fu. Many of Lee’s poems are filled with themes of simplicity, strength, and silence. All are strongly influenced by his family history, childhood, and individuality. He writes with simplicity and passion which creates images that take the reader deeper and also requires his audience to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. These feelings of exile and boldness to rebel take shape as they provide common themes for many of his poems.

Li-Young Lee has been an established Asian American poet who has been doing interviews for the past twenty years. Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (BOA Editions, 2006, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll), is the first edited and published collection of interviews with an Asian American poet. In this collection, Earl G. Ingersoll asks "conversational" questions to bring out Lee’s views on Asian American poetry, writing, and identity.

Reviews

[Maxwell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've really enjoyed some of Lee's poetry I've read in this past, but I think congregated into one collection, it's all a bit too much. His poems are easy to read but hard to digest, and he works with pretty high concepts sometimes that create a distance from the reader. There were some lines that definitely had me stop and re-read it because of how simple but beautiful they were, but overall not my favorite collection.

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always with Lee's work, the family pulses are strong, as are the love poems. I am especially interested in the immigrant story represented here. Some of my favorite lines:

I’m never finished answering to the dead.

Now I’m dying of my life. Now I’m alive inside my death.

me a forgetful flesh learning the heart’s tables by repetition,

And speech’s bird threads hunger’s needle or perishes in a thicket of words.

[Umair Akram · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Why are you crying? my father asked
in my dream, in which we faced each other,
knees touching, seated in a moving train.
He had recently died,
and I was wondering if my life would ever begin.
Looking out the window,
one of us witnessed what kept vanishing,
while the other watched what continually emerged"

.............

Lee Young li writes in metaphors,
and I only understand half ..... 🤧

[Jessie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only a few poems in this collection sing for me like those in LYL's ROSE; still, those few really sing. Mother is figured here, a nice complement to the figured, almost mythic father in ROSE; also LYL mines his immigrant experience here and reaches into his childhood in Indonesia, feeling the loss of it.

In this book are the simple, natural, monosyllabic images I find central to Lee, with those subtle twists, often in the verb, to defamiliarize: “when trees start to ache and green” (84) [I admit that I can’t follow, or find true, many of the twists in this collection – maybe on rereading – but I relish the strangeness all the same:]. As in ROSE, he cycles through and focuses on a handful of resonant, multi-faced images: bird, tree, dove, apple, the lover’s voice, light (“known lights” and “the ancestor of light” 55). The poems look inward, past-ward, love-ward, toward connection [“The world is all dark, yet a hand finds its way/ to other hands, a mouth its way to another mouth.” (37):]; he’s always intimate and, I think, always concerned with the nature of being itself, often in ways that I can’t quite access though I want to.

As in ROSE (and as in Rilke, a prominent influence on Lee), God is still ripening in these poems: “But wasn’t it God who lured the child/ ever higher into the tree with glimpses/ of God’s own ripening body?” Lee seems always to be pushing for something more akin to Psalm and Lamentation (like Gerald Stern, as Lee describes in Breaking the Alabaster Jar) and not simply the anecdotal – he goes for the core and primal and ancient (I think of Goethe writing something like We too must write bibles): “now that you’re older/ at the beginning of a new century,/ what kept you alive/ all those years keeps you from living.” And from 95, a poem whose surface narrative is a boring husband talking in order to put his restless wife asleep; of course what he says is a kind of philosophy, a kind of statement about love and God; here’s one stanza: “Then, to surrender any sense of an I/ is to feel our true condition, a You/ before God, and to be seen.”

My two favorites: “Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics” and “To Hold”

[Shayla]

(3rd read 3/1/2025)

One day we'll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we'll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn't for our having.
So often fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I'll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

***

I found you at dawn
sitting by the open kitchen window.
You were sorting seeds in a plate.

And if you were praying out loud,
I'll never tell.

And if you were listening to the doves,
and if their various whoo-ing and coo-ing,
and dying in time,
are your earliest questions blown back to you
through the ragged seasons,

and if you've lived your life
in answer to those questions,
I'll never tell.

Your destiny is safe with me.
Your childhood is safe with me.
What you decide to bury is safe with me.

***

I said, "We should give up
trying to speak or to be understood.
It's too late in the world for dialogue."

(2nd read 4/8/2023)

(first read 9/20/22)

But I woke up one night
and realized I was falling.
I turned on the lamp and the lamp was falling.
And the hand that turned on the lamp was falling.
And the light was falling, and everything the light touched
falling. And you were falling
asleep beside me.
And that was the first happy ending.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his fourth collection, Li-Young Lee again expertly explores issues of mortality and the spirit, writing meditative verses that are grounded in natural imagery. With each collection, Lee has deftly explored the line between the metaphysical and the physical worlds, placing the human directly in between the two, as "a blossom mortally wounded on its stem" (71), always trying to traverse the knowledge of our own mortality, and to delineate between what is temporal and what is eternal in this life. Lee's gift is that he finds the joy in this struggle, and here, in the final section of book, even enters a more domestic world, with poems striking sparks from the banal details of a long-term relationship, with a partner and a home. With the exception of "Virtues of the Boring Husband" (92-97), most of the longer poems lose momentum because of Lee's dense, heavy lines, but they are all well worth wading through to get the gems, such as "To Life" (56), a worthy compliment to one of his best poems from his last book ("Book of My Nights"), "One Heart."

[CX Dillhunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read this book three time; incredible mix of prose poetry at its best (Virtues of the Boring Husband), memoir (Secret Life, The Shortcut Home), and mysitical/magical (The Lives of a Voice, My Favorite Kingdom, Station) to name name six of my favorite rereads in a book that really defies categorization. Doves, water, sister, mother, father, apples, light, dark crawl as words bigger than life through the poems tying them together, knotting into your mind.

[Kendrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 2008, this collection by Li-Young Lee appears prescient in anticipating the language and interests of Asian American poets in the 2010s. The first two sections work the language of war and displacement, turning backwards and forwards in its attempt to understand the speaker's current mental state:

If you happen to have watched armed men
beat and drag your father
out the front door of your house
and into the back of an idling truck

before your mother jerked you from the threshold
and buried your face in her skirt folds,
try not to judge your mother too harshly.

Don't ask her what she thought she was doing
turning a child's eyes
away from history
and towards that place all human aching starts...

- from "Self-Help for Fellow Refugees".

But there are personal poems here - trying to work out the depths of a parent's relationships, how to write marital love - as well as poems of a more mystical nature. Most of Lee's poems showcase his strengths in developing recurring metaphors across sequences, but on occasion Lee's voice loses the thread, turning poems into abstruse thickets.

This is apparent, I think, in Lee's love poem "Virtues of the Boring Husband". It is ambitious in its length, Lee's musings on Love's nature are supposed to strike an irony against the simplicity of his wife's drowsiness. But as he goes into ever-more abstract visualizations of what love is ("God's first quadrant... God's first personhood...") it draws me further away from the simple nature of what love is.

I respect Lee's ambition to weave a complicated tapestry, but sometimes a love poem is understatement, as Julia Nicole Camp's poem goes.

A Bookmark Near The End

He loves history. He wanted to write a biography of John Quincy Adams. I, shamefully, knew almost nothing about John Quincy Adams, so I went online and bought every biography of him I could find. One day, he called me, claiming that we wouldn’t work out long term. He said he loved me but that we had different interests. “What does love mean to you?” I said. “That’s an impossible question,” he replied. I, however, find love to be quite simple. Love is the stack of biographies on my nightstand with a bookmark near the end.

[Aiman Sabir · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish you were a poet-
blunt and mindless
just another criminal-
attacking and looting
the treasure of thoughts.
you'd use your words
as a weapon
to defend your past.

I wish you were a poet-
lonely and confused
just another fool-
blaming and challenging
the crimes of society.
you'd use your solitude
as a screen
to feign the outcast.

I wish you were a poet-
bad and ruined
just another evil-
destroying and clearing
the good from literature.
you'd use your sins
as an excuse
to refine your art.

I wish you were a poet-
rude and wretched
just another abnormal-
singing and dancing
Alone in the dark.
you'd use your darkness
as a bait
to catch my heart.

/-I wish you were a poet

[Dain · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this really hit or miss. When it was good, it was really good, and when it was bad, it was a chore to read. On the whole, the good far outweighed the bad. I particularly liked the poems about immigrants and refugees -- this was written some time ago, but the issues are still just as, if not more relevant today. Also, I got a kick out the poem where the speaker helps cure his wife's insomnia by being a bore.

[Renee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every Li-Young Lee book I read further solidifies him as my favorite living poet. He captures the sanctity of the everyday and mundane so well. Poets take what is ordinary and reveal the extraordinary; they use the natural to point to the supernatural. Lee is a master.

[Monica Wilson]

phenomenal

[Saadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

All words fall short of what this man does with words.

[Forgetmenot]

One of the only poetry books I’ve ever really read all the way through. really love his writing! “To hold” I still think about a lot.

[지훈 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I NEED MORE LI-YOUNG LEE LOVE POEMS NOWWW

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Lee’s fourth collection of poems and I think his best, though I have the discoverer’s fondness for his first collection, Rose. It was on a shelf in a narrow bookcase in the reception area of the Chinatown History Project that I first saw Lee’s work, pulling a copy of Rose while I waited for an appointment. Just killing time but I was so captivated that I bought the book after reading just a handful of poems. Lee investigates language and meaning, turning words this way and that until they tell him something memorable, something not so secret or so mysterious as it first appeared. He does the same with memory and history, family and spirituality. He juxtaposes personal and political, living and dead, certainty and wonder. A boy climbs a tree to a dangerous height, observes his family through the windows of his house. “And where is his father? / In the room with the shut curtains, of course. / He’s talking to God again, who plays / hide and seek among His names.” Later he asks, “isn’t the boy God’s prey?” And for once, Lee, who asks a lot of questions in his poems, a rhetoric of wonder, answers: “And who wakes now but God in the boy’s flesh / and astonished bright blood, // at his hands suddenly see, / his feet begin to find / his weight alive, / his mind aligned / now with the fate of a stunned will // but some greener knowing and / feeling his way back to earth. // God’s destiny is safe / for now inside the child.” It’s a lovely transition from a boy’s dilemma to a poet’s revelation. The collection is full of such magical transitions. From “First World”: “Sister we died in childhood, remember? / Into birds we died, into their flying. // Toward all of sky we perished so completely / our mother cried, ‘Where are my little ones?’” It’s not a literal or even imagined dying but a disappearance into playful imagination, as children do. Lee remembers this now that he is past the age of play with his sister, now that he is middle-aged and a parent himself, though this is no stated part of this poem that ends: “We died, and we go on dying. / So where would I look for us except / in everything I see.” Another poem begins, “And so we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I / make the bed.” It describes the careful folding. The act doesn’t nullify the beginning sentence. The poem’s middle admits, “One day we’ll lie down and not get up. / One day, all we guard will be surrendered. // Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize / what we love, and what it takes / to tend what isn’t for our having.” So maybe juxtaposition isn’t what’s happening here but an integrating of opposites, a reconciling of the paradoxical reality of what we know and what we believe. In the exquisite “Self-Help for Fellow Refugees,” Lee writes “It doesn’t matter. What matters is this: / The kingdom of heaven is good. / But heaven on earth is better. // Thinking is good / But living is better. // Alone in your favorite chair / with a book you enjoy / is fine. But spooning / is even better.” Not a facile destination for a poem that began with images of his father being dragged away from his family by the army, a dictator’s prisoner and not for the first time, but a miraculous one. Sometimes I wish there was a question or two less, that he didn’t name things as if every noun translated to magically descriptive phrases, but mostly I marvel at his command of the trains of his life: the personal, the familial, the political, the spiritual, and how he makes them available to the reader.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Li-Young Lee, Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008)

Li-Young Lee has been one of my favorite poets for over twenty years, ever since I first picked up The City in Which I Love You in my college bookstore on a whim back in 1990. Part of the reason I'm such a fan is that Lee, while embracing the poetry-as-therapy paradigm so prevalent among bad poets, but always staying on the correct line of that other paradigm so important to poets, show-don't-tell. Thus it was that I cracked this book and started reading, I was kind of shocked. This first section crosses that line. Obliterates it, in fact. Show goes right down the tubes and tell rears its nasty head.

“'We can't stay where we are,
and we don't know where else to go,'

is the first card my mother deals. We're playing
her deluxe edition of 'Memories
of the 20th Century.'

'Dead Baby,' 'Mystery Bundles,' 'Cleansing by Sacrifice.'

Seven cards apiece and the object is to not die.”
(“Mother Deluxe”)

While the metaphor is kind of inspired, it's still the sort of thing one would expect to see on gothpoetry.net. Just because William Carlos Williams stuck a grocery list in the middle of a poem and called it poetry doesn't mean everyone can do it. (And doesn't mean Williams should have in the first place, really.) In order to get through that first section, I kept telling myself that things would eventually get better. Thankfully, they did. It's somewhat ironic that Lee's strongest poems here are those where he (or his narrator) seems least sure of his own voice, as in the book's strongest piece, “Virtues of the Boring Husband”:

“I just lie down beside her,
prop my head up in one hand and say,
'You know, I've been thinking.'

Immediately she calms down,
finds a fetal posture,
and tucks her head under my arm.”

See the difference? Describing. Showing us, as opposed to just dropping things in our lap. It makes all the difference in the world. It's what makes Li-Young Lee great. ***

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's see and hear what rests and runs behind these eyes and ears. Let's see and hear if this simple thought experiment works in and out of breath's heart and mind: In and out of my heart and mind rests and runs this breath, these (analogical) limited lines of thought: Li-Young Lee is for and to poetry like Hayao Miyazaki is for and to anime. Beautiful. Breathtaking. Earthly. Familial. Fatherly. Heavenly. Hospitable. Interstitial. Motherly. Mystical. Universal.

I used to listen to the CD recording of Li-Young Lee's lovely, melancholy voice during my daily commute. Interstitial intersections. Pregnant pauses. Serenity and silence and spaciousness in the thick of tantalizing toil and traffic and trouble.

My favorites include the following seven to eight poems: "Self-Help for Fellow Refugees"; "Have You Prayed?"; "A Hymn to Childhood"; "Immigrant Blues"; "Cuckoo Flower on the Witness Stand"; "Standard Checklist for Amateur Mystics"; "Virtues of the Boring Husband"; "Station."

Seven is the perfect number in the West; eight is the lucky one in the East. Perhaps, upon re-reviewing, I should give this book review an additional (fifth) star to complete the poet's writing life process, in order to make me, to make it whole.

[Noah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't quite get into this collection of poems, but I wish I could. Maybe if a better reader took me through a few of these I'd enjoy it more. As it was, I did like a few lines, like this one, from "In His Own Shadow," because I like the idea that not recognizing another master than Death is just a lack of sight:

His body throws two shadows:
One onto the table
and the piece of paper before him,
and one onto his mind.

One makes it difficult for him to see
the words he’s written and crossed out
on the paper. The other
keeps him from recognizing
another master than Death.

-------------------------

And the end of this poem ("Self-Help for Fellow Refugees"), is sweet:

And I bet you can’t say what language
your father spoke when he shouted to your mother
from the back of the truck, "Let the boy see!"

Maybe it wasn’t the language you used at home.
Maybe it was a forbidden language.
Or maybe there was too much screaming
and weeping and the noise of guns in the streets.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is this:
The kingdom of heaven is good.
But heaven on earth is better.

Thinking is good.
But living is better.

Alone in your favorite chair
with a book you enjoy
is fine. But spooning
is even better.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where is he writing from? Where does he go when he writes these poems? I have no idea. Some of these lines made me perplexed, as if they are spoken from a place where the concept of "sky" and "shadow" and "death" are completely different. I looked at the lines "Death creates a blind spot. / Man is a secret, blind to himself," "Sister, we died in childhood, remember? / Into birds we died, into their flying," "A clock the bees unearth, / gathering the overspilled minutes." over and over.. Some of these poems were truly breathtaking for me. Reading the poems really made me feel the totality of how poetry is a spiritual practice for him (as opposed to an aesthetic practice for many others). The poems are mystical. Subdued power. Incomprehensible like very old runes. I think with him, poetry becomes something otherworldly. An experience. I turn the last page and return to the world, and for some reason, the realm within his pages was so much bigger, more wondrous, than the world I am in now.

[Ginna]

Jeff Oliver posted this poem along with the AK lit happenings calendar. I'm always hungry for more of Lee's poetry -

To Hold

So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into alignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping

.....................

Li-Young Lee. Behind My Eyes. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2008.

[Helen Chung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Li-Young Lee's poems are thoughtfully written and immersed in biblical language and story. The poet was born in Indonesia to Chinese parents, and the family fled to escape anti-Chinese sentiment, settling in the U.S. in 1964. Lee's father became a Presbyterian minister.

Here is a paragraph lifted from the Poetry Foundation blog's bio on the poet: "Lee has said that he considers every poem to be a “descendent of God.” When asked about flawed poems by Poets and Writers, Lee explained: “There are great poems that have flaws. There are failures of perception, failures of understanding, but those flaws become a part of the poem’s integrity, so I still feel that those poems are descendants of God. But if a poem isn’t even good enough to be a poem, I don’t think it’s descended from God: [If] there is no “I” [as in Martin Buber’s I and Thou], there is no God. The ‘Me’ talking about ‘Me’—that’s not enough.”

[John Struloeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy Li-Young's poetry. He has a controlled, steady, mystical voice -- in person and on the page. I heard him read a number of these poems when he was at Stanford. At his craft lecture, he talked about the connection between words/utterance and breath. Breath in, breath out. You can't do both at once -- it's a steady swing, back and forth, controlled, meditative. Sometimes certain poems or lines are confusing -- a bit too abstract and mystical -- but when he's good, he's good. I find myself returning to some of the poems, or some lines, wanting to re-read them and hear the wonderful music in them. For example, in a poem about his mother, he writes, "...there are tears inside me I'll never weep." So true. I love that.

I recommend all of his books. I don't know that this is his best, but it's still worth a look (or several more).

[Tracy O · Rating 5 out of 5]

I start to roll my eyes in consulting conversations when someone uses the phrase "robust resources" or in design discussions when someone refers to the "integrity of the materials," or in poetry articles when I see the term "spaciousness". These phrases must have meant something real when they were fresh, but they are such cliches I have to shy away from using them. But, spaciousness is the best description for this poetry. I had more room in my head after I read the book. Beautiful rhythm and language, and affecting ideas.

This is much more metaphysical than his other stuff which I'm not normally into, and it's still sinking in, but I loved it. Still haven't listened to the audio, but he's a great public reader so I'm looking forward to it.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't often read poetry. I'm drawn more to the actions of varied characters in prose or thought-provoking analysis in non-fiction. But every time I pick up a book of poems, I hope that they're as good as this one. It feels good to be so intimate with someone. Stories and commentary are for many. But poetry brings you mouth to ear with one person - whispers attempting to explain existence.

There is darkness, sadness here - a speaker who has seen horrendous things. But there is also hope, which I cling to. Some lines celebrate love so simply, I want to response inversely: bursting into the sky with all the joy compressed in moments and words so small.

“We died, and we go on dying.
So where would I look for us except
in everything I see.”

[Hayley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't think of many other words that come to mind when I read this besides "moved," "Rivers," and "memory." I don't even think all three of them necessarily make sense in this context. What I mean to say is that Lee's poetry not only brings the past alive in each poem, but in the reader as well. I was particularly enraptured by "Sweet Peace in Time" and "Living with Her." Additionally, some of them walked the line between 'funny' and 'pensive'- like "Virtues of the Boring Husband," not that Lee makes it clear that a poem needs to be either one or the other.

Just, great. Truly inspiring. I definitely plan to read more.

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee's poems are consistently stunning, pulling together careful observation, powerful language, and graceful moments in any given line and stanza. Falling into his work is something like journeying into another space and another mind, his poems are each, from beginning to end, so carefully constructed. And yet, they seem effortless, and they are readable and engaging. Few poems in this collection are not stand-outs, and in most collections, any of these poems would leap from the pages and demand attention and re-reading.

Simply, Lee's work is powerful and forever worth reading, forever worth sharing.

Recommended.

[H · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a gift — I know what kind of poetry I like, and this isn’t it.

There were some poems that I liked, like the first one, but there were a lot of poems I disliked. The whole thing was too abstract for me. There were common themes throughout the book and repeated images like descriptions of apples, wind, lakes, etc. I liked this because you can tell the poet had intention.

But other than that, there were poems that were abstract about Time and childhood and I didn’t enjoy those at all. I’m not saying that no one in the world could enjoy this poet, but the work was just not for me.

[Kirsten Kinnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this-- just not quite as much as Book of My Nights. It traces a wider arc stylistically, sometimes more ephemeral sometimes more lucidly narrative. I like both extremes, but the swinging between them caused the collection itself to seem less centered. Nevertheless, Lee's themes of his childhood immigration to the States and the tangible yet mysteriously just-out-of-sight, nearly tidal, influence of God and his parents-- these themes come more sharply into focus in this collection.

[Stephen Kiernan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lee is one of my favorite living poets, but this is not my favorite of his books. He spends many poems on the notions of art and the immortality of voice, and he resorts too often to a kind of surreal list-making in the place of imagery, narrative or metaphor.

Yet the collection is redeemed by several astonishing poems to his wife, and to the transcendent power of their love. Those poems will hook you and hold you and echo inside you.