Lenfestey - A Marriage Book

CHASE TWICHELL In this age of cynicism, or at the very least irony, it is good to come upon a book that celebrates marriage and family without either sentimentality or ambivalence. So much poetry is about storms, / bruised fruit, locusts eating everything, Lenfestey writes. This poem is about a harvest that satisfies. LINDA PASTAN Warning Label: prepare to be shaken, moved, amused, terrified, relieved, delighted. Take in small doses or one large gulp; either way, you will be healed. These poems are alive with many things: stories, images, metaphors, but more than anything else they are alive with rhythm.

These are poems of mutual passion, but also of heartbreak and solitude. In the final stanza of My Wife Sleeping as I Drive, Lenfestey writes: We plunge along our course of earth, / each alert in our own way, / ahead the blue-black sky full / of oncoming lights and stars. How amazing that we have been invited along for the ride! JIM MOORE Think of Lenfesteys A Marriage Book as a talking photo album or an unfolding epithalamium. The lovers meet and marry; the children arrive and grow up. Along the way, there are days of joy and anxious nights, sweetness and humor. The narrator is a courageous captain, an old shepherd / exhausted with tending, and a Marco Polo, but like his predecessors, he always returns to his center, his wife, who is (as he says) his life.

What a fine tribute to fifty years of real-world love! JOYCE SUTPHEN Lenfesteys poems encircle a marriage while opening it out into the depths and heights with tendernessI might say reverenceand grace. The poems move from outer rituals into the interior world of the self that wants to make sense of birth, joy, damage, death, and grief, but cant, entirely. You want to know how it is to stay through the long haul? Look to these poems. It is gravity, / which limits us totally, / which makes all life possible, Lenfestey writes. These are the poems of a brave heart and a skilled poet. They will make you want to kiss your sweetheart.

FLEDA BROWN Ive been an avid reader of Lenfesteys work for many years. His Seeking the Cave was a wonder, and so is his Marriage Book, a collection rooted in passion, desire, sensuality, and the shared heat of love. This is, above all, a book of transcendence, of celebration. Containing a wealth of extraordinary poems, it appears to have been conceived in a beautiful sustained burst of illumination, with Lenfestey overlapping his themes to create a collection so seamless it could well be read as one long poem. This is a truly superb book, an absolute joy to read. ROBERT HEDIN I just finished reading A Marriage Book straight through.

Such a treasure. Virtuosic, with all the different moods and colors and shadings and statements and counterstatements, and so beautiful. A very wonderful book. ELIZABETH GORDON MCKIM These generous poems, attractive in their emotional directness, confident in their subject matter, bring us into contact with the intimacies of an intensely lived life, insisting both on their frequent joysthere is playfulness, there is fervorand on disclosing the vulnerabilities that demanding relationships reveal in us over the decades. MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE

Lenfestey All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415. (800) 520-6455 milkweed.org Published 2017 by Milkweed Editions Printed in the United States of America Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker Author photo by Larry Marcus 17 18 19 20 21 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from Wells Fargo. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lenfestey, James P., author.

Title: A marriage book / James P. Lenfestey. Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2017039309 | ISBN 9781571314925 (pbk.: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Marriage--Poetry.

Classification: LCC PS3612.E528 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039309 Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worlds endangered forests and conserve natural resources. A Marriage Book was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Thomson-Shore. for SusanIn the final analysis, poets and novelists will have more to say about love than psychologists, for they express the inexpressible, and describe individual persons and their love problems, with their individual solutions and failures, and this is true to life and to eros. John Sanford, The Invisible Partners PROLOGUE WHO WOULD BELIEVE Even a good poet must be wary as a spider offering a book of love poems to the woman he married fifty years ago. If he exaggerates his love, shell know.

If he denies it, shell devour him while remembering her old dead lovers. If he sands off the edge of his desire, whats the point? And if his desire for her is undiminished, who would believe? PART ONE