Don't Do It, We Love You, My Heart

“Fink’s a better guide than Dante had through our hells and heavens.” – Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club and Lit

In a wide range of lyrically rich poems, award-winning poet Jonathan Fink interrogates the perpetual mysteries and resonances at the convergence of national identity, historical influence, and personal experience.In Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart, Jonathan Fink interweaves a welcome range of poetic styles including expansive, narrative poems, shorter, lyrical poems, and intricate one-sentence poems that are sustained over multiple pages to deliver his most intimate collection to date. Charting changing national and personal landscapes, Fink’s writing explores such diverse subjects as growing up in West Texas at the conclusion of the Cold War; ekphrastic poems about the paintings of Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art theft; the intuitive language he shares with his infant daughter on a quiet evening before she falls asleep; and the famous story of a suicide prevented on the George Washington Bridge—the jumper stayed by the man who tells him, “Don’t do it–we love you, my heart.” The imperative, urgent compassion conveyed in the stranger’s command thrums through all the poems in this collection, compelling the reader outward to deeper connections and lived empathy.

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