42 Poems from One Year
“The 42 poems in this book were culled from a 365-poem opus titled One Year. Each poem in One Year was composed according to the following method:
I would take a day—say, January 18—and, sifting through more than 25 years of journals, extract everything that was entered on that date (thoughts, reportage, dreams, conversations, overheard remarks, passages copied from books I was reading, etc.). Then I would isolate clusters of material, combine and recombine them, amplifying and further atomizing the fragments and finally whittling them down to no more than one page of text. so while everything that “happens” in a given poem did indeed transpire on its given date, that date is unmoored in time, representing many years and as many places and circumstances—ergo, the “she” who appears in the first line of a particular poem is not necessarily the same “she” who appears in the next line.”
—Mikhail Horowitz
