This Shouldn't Be Beautiful But It Was & It Was All I Had So I Drew It

Poetry. "Falling in love while losing a loved one and watching the war news on TV? Life is difficult, and the poems in this marvelous collection ask a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? Each poem supplies part of the answer--to go looking, to make mistakes, to be confused, to be wounded, to keep moving toward a new life. 'The expression of our faces when we almost get to where we are going'--that is the expression we have while reading this book, which has the pace of an intense, anticipated journey, one that acknowledges that language is a problem, that art, science, and history are problems, but nonetheless many disparate lives, both past and present, somehow meld into one small life lived, and when that life speaks--'mouth deliver us to the present'--we sit up and listen, for the experience of reading has handed us a strange joy."--Mary Ruefle