Curses and Wishes by Carl Adamshick
Memory – whether as “a nest / of mud and grass hidden in the bright / summer branches” or as “that chain/we feel every time we walk” – is very much the subject here, in resonant tension with an understandable desire “to forget/what the world has shown you,” given what the world of these poems contains: war, holocaust, betrayal, broken childhoods, failures of head and heart. But throughout these poems, intimate and worldly at once, there’s also a dogged will to believe in life’s better possibilities, a commitment to something like devotion, in a world of fallen gods.

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