Great Regulars: I could not get his first two lines

out of my head, and it seems that my poem was a way of trying to break that aural spell. It became, oddly, a poem both about the porous barrier between the living and the dead, and about the role language plays in crossing that barrier, which is one of [Miron] Bialoszewski's great themes. It became in the end also--or so friends tell me--a poem about the role of eros in translation.

from The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: 'Terminal Etude' by Alissa Valles

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