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Today's poem is "Against Vanishing"
from Nude With Anything

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James D'Agostino was born prematurely in Chicago, where he later received a B.A. from Loyola University. He took an M.F.A. from Indiana University, and is completing a Ph.D. at Western Michigan University. His poems have appeared in such magazines as TriQuarterly, Conduit, Forklift, Ohio, Green Mountains Review, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), and Denver Quarterly. He currently lives in Missouri with his wife, the poet Karen Carcia.

About Nude With Anything:

"In Nude With Anything, the senses are fully awake much of the time, as James D'Agostino explores the world through defamiliarizing metaphor and shifts of perception; but the ‘half-seen’ emerges too, as the poet discovers ‘the possibility emptiness provides.’ In the frequent play of light and shadow, breath and air, surface and substance, the least embodied is often the most deeply experienced. ‘Sometimes the mouth of the world / opens,’ Miller says, ‘though at the last minute, / it always holds its tongue.’ That is often the moment when the poet most poignantly speaks to us in this wonderfully moving first book."
—Martha Collins

"‘A late hope,’ one of Jamie D’Agostino’s poems ends characteristically, in ‘the ellipse of the morning,’ at its beginning yet at its very latest opportunity—where else would anything like hope literally exist? From this first book’s first lines we find ourselves in a poetry rich, duplicitous, joyous, driven enough to resemble creation, metamorphic yet holding on, alive. It may be a measure of this poet’s marvelous technique that he can take the moments and memories chosen for him and constructions of his own making and refuse to stay still there, and in the midst of exquisite visual feeling-tones just step out from it all and speak even more amazing acknowledgements. In this sure voice is a heartbreaking, enlivening faith."
—William Olsen

"I love these poems, their cathedral-like meditations, their brilliant sentences spiraling like silver necklaces of DNA. Or water falling down successive terraces. What they track, ‘the necessary coordinates / of precisely here,’ is mysterious as a fingerprint, intimate as blood-flow. ‘Believing / nothing,’ D'Agostino says, ‘I believed slowly what I could, a little / ceremony, if even only / pouring ordinary water one glass to another to feel a thing / turn into itself again and again . . . .’ In biology, recognition occurs when a molecule attaches itself to another whose shape is receptive. D’Agostino’s poems move thought to thought with that same unerring receptivity; and yet it is equally true that an enormous tenderness drifts through them like the Milky Way."
—Nancy Eimers

"James D’Agostino’s poems propose emergency measures. Follow them. They will save your life."
—Mary Ruefle



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