This collection pulls poems from Bodakov’s various books to give us a portrait of a poet over the course of a life in writing, a portrait that is also an elegy for a man who cataloged longing and grief, loneliness and loss like few others. And though these poems circle around loss, absence, and failure more than any other feeling, they are not poems that give up in despair. No, a macabre, self-deprecating humor and wit enlivens them. And even more, the voice of these poems is tinged with compassion. Bodakov sings of a body that long to forgive and be forgiven, “to make peace while we’re still here.” He sings of a man that seeks friendship and communion, of a son who mourns the death of his father. His poetry is like the “Guileless sky” he writes about, one that “turns sins into mistakes, wine into water. Me into you.” Let us sit under that sky for a while and drink the water he gives us. “

— Jeremy Padenis

cover design by KIRIL ZLATKOV