Declaration for your bones

I don't know of another collection as interrogative as Duane Esposito's Declaration For Your Bones, but his questions are posed within a poetics of discovery that keeps us with him all the way to and through "Where might we find love?" He senses himself as "the single, black cloud/hovering inside our home," a home of traumatic memory forking both ways within a marriage, a love that is "a knotted, purple,/nameless, strange affliction," and one that is also necessary and sustaining. This fine book is Esposito's starkest, its affirmation coming, if it does at all, in its uncompromised and earned austerity which, in the end, must, and does, serve both him and us.

William Heyen

Deeply intimate, these meditations illuminate the shared skin of our common fears, celebrate our courage and frailty, as we labor to understand how and why we go on. This work is the act of soul-making, of intense spiritual exploration. The language jolts and smolders, singes with truth. Duane Esposito is a gifted poet.

Gladys Henderson