Dears, Beloveds

Kevin Phan

• Publisher: Center for Literary Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781885635754
• eBook ISBN: 9781885635761
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The 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.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• [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 jockeyingthrough the cracks]
• [What brought us from the ocean into diamondBuddhafields?]
• [Kombucha & skincare]
• [Here’s the church, here’s the steeple]
• [I walk past the mental hospital]
• [Dappled eggs in space. Chickens scratchconstellations 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 sostill]
• [In last night’s dream, I collected my deadmother]
• [At the Oldorf Hospice House of Mercy]
• [I now intensely cultivate universal love]
• [My heart continues to digest mother’s brokengrammar]
• [Into each pore, we ask the world in]
• [“Every word,” wrote Beckett, “is like anunnecessary stain”]
• [Animals & stars were never ours to hold]
• [What would it mean, never to be brought intobeing?]
• [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 dominionover]
• [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 allthings]
• [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 helda blood orange]
• [Brothers, sisters, impossible to say]
• [Dears. Beloveds]
• [Closing waves]
• Notes
• Acknowledgments