The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love

Like the best songs, Julie Choffel's The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love is a poem fueled by desire. To have "so many / ways to say I want" is dangerous and selfish, we've heard: we should be content; we should be grateful. But "women are never / not hungry," Choffel's mother-speaker insists, aware that her life plays out as two tracks in the same song-the material world of meals and routines as well as the imaginative realm. Poetry is this "parallel universe," these "other zones," this "floor / under the garbage," these subterranean places where we meet to tend to different hungers. In Choffel's hands, these spaces bloom with deep seeing and wry humor: "there I go / again trying to liberate us from what we don't know." The poem becomes a vehicle for satisfying its own longings, a gift then passed along to us as readers-so that we, too, might dance to such a soundtrack in our kitchens and in the otherworlds that envelop the everyday. If you're willing to risk being brought back to your own desires, enter The Inevitable Return. -Becca Klaver