Allow Me

Since receiving her "first / rejection slip" at the age of ten through her father's dismissal of women writers, Irene Willis has written past his disapproval, "learning / my mother's language" and drawing on the lives of both parents to craft memorable poems on gender, ageing, and mortality. As she acknowledges with wistfulness and humor "my own end near," she considers the word deceased: "I'm writing this / after names / in my address book. / It's better than / crossing them out," and recalls "a poet who paid homage to her dog / by tasting its ashes." In poems praised previously by Maxine Kumin and Alicia Ostriker, Irene Willis conveys a life rich in its ordinariness and extraordinary in its loves. Through the decades-long making of these poems, that ten-year-old has come to recognize that "her mind was hers, and hers alone."

-Michael Waters

Michael Waters has been called one of the best American poets writing today, praised for his pleasure in the figurative and musical possibilities of language. His latest book is Caw; others are Celestial Joyride, Gospel Night, Darling Vulgarity and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems. He has received five Pushcart prizes and many other awards and fellowships for his work.