I Have to Tell You Something

In the world of Eddie Dowe's poems, Adam and Eve stand under the maple, confessing to their uncertainty at the aftermath. Whose child is it that climbs into their bed, complaining at their lateness, insisting he is 'ready to be named'? The moon is bald; the stars have teeth; buffalo ' eat] stars in a dark field.' Everything in the universe of I Have to Tell You Something is hornets, burning handshakes, and yearning. It is studded with graveyards, but the poet puts a window in each one and ' pulls] the curtains back.' Which is to say, in these strange times, we might still learn to feel as the poet does: 'I am a dying man / but a dying man still lives.' The secret he insists on delivering in each poem, then, is that we're invited. Luisa A. Igloria, Poet Laureate of Virginia and Author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser Mack Daddy surrealist Robert Desnos wrote 'the living and the dead yield to me and salute me / the former coldly the