Verse from the Village

All that lives goes to die and all that dies goes to feed all that lives. That’s the heart of it: life, death, and everything in between. From balloons and new shoes to surviving two bouts of COVID and the illness and death of both parents, Right Wrong Night Song finds poetry everywhere—even its title is a tiny poem. The restless eye of the poet roams the freeways and neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the BLM protests of 2020, nature’s terrible beauty, and wordless internal landscapes, to capture telling moments of human behavior in all our messy glory. And white poet Rogers goes there: he takes on race and whiteness with unsparing compassion in poems and an afterword essay.