Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems by Ona Gritz & Daniel Simpson

The poems in Border Songs offer more than a conversation between poets: they’re conversant, knowledgeable, informed by eros, loss, delight, curiosity, and intimate wisdom. This collection stays long after you’ve stopped reading to meditate alone about body and soul.

–Stephen Kuusisto

Love’s not easy. Belonging is even harder. And true poetry’s more difficult, I swear, than love and belonging combined. The speakers in these poems have cultivated a rich patience, have, separately, established sonorous, intelligent lives full of tenderness and nuance and passed them along to us in an embrace. One tells us, “…the trees / turned into notebooks so the story could change.” The other: “I’m just getting to love / this world for what it is, a flawed place / with its subway platforms overlooking the third rail . . . .” And change and love is what this book is about, risk and quiet transformation, a deeper change than drama. That these voices, against the odds, have found one another is a sort of miracle, that they are harmonious and comforting speaks volumes of our larger humanity and of our singular loves.  True poems. Reading this book is “like hearing music in a cathedral.”

–Renée Ashley