We are colors of bruises that our father’s father wore. We grow up with love, but confusion. We love, but confess it’s a sentence sans final punctuation. It’s never really ordinary. It’s never really simple. It’s never even final, and sometimes it just leaves you as an ellipsis. But we are time and space and string theory.
Keith Wilson’s Field Notes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon Press) is a research guide. It’s a study in being a spectator. Viewing life and love like bird watching. Like waiting for something to happen, to change, but not knowing what it is, or what it’s changing. This, much like Ray Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines, studies the origins of us all – of space and time and our limited existence. It’s knowing that we are all here to change ourselves, but not knowing to what.
This collection is the longing to understand why black is a color, what pigeons can tell us about the world, and how those within it don’t always act with kindness or move the conversation forward in a positive direction. This is poetry. This is not comfort. This is research and love and a want to know more about the life we aren’t always living, but could be.
Purchase your copy of Field Notes on Ordinary Love from Copper Canyon Press.