The door always used to swing shut, by itself, for years and years, with measured haste. / Now it stands utterly still.

By remembering how many foreign debts anglophone poetry has accrued over the centuries of its existence ... we are reminded that a poet like Reynek, who seems to emerge from a faraway country of which we know little, is part of the same tradition ... This is lyric poetry of a type in which the poet uses certain patterns of rhyme and pacing that many previous generations have. It is a way of finding likenesses in both words and the world, or sometimes impressing phonic likenesses on disparate experiences, and savoring the phases of that difference.

It could’ve easily been a scrotum, / but most likely it was someone’s wallet.

You must be hungry, he said. / A magnificent sentence like that, / the last I remember him saying.

On the beds/ Of a lantern-lit hospital/ A doctor/ Playing the flute/ Revives/ Dead tubercular women

I will love neither wildly / nor tamely / a long lukewarm love

A hooker / gives me the come on. Whether I really // don’t want anything. I don’t, even if / I think about it afterwards.

the ceaseless forgetting and reminiscing about pleasure / maybe two swans on the Seine / maybe one

I had never seen / such a narrow room / when we wanted to turn around / we had to embrace