The Invention of Love
For the cat that eats on the street,
the child took out milk. Looking through the window
at the empty bowl, she remembers soup
when there was heat for the stove.
Her dad's jacket passes by the bowl.
The girl rushes out the door and follows.
His coat neither answers nor turns when she calls.
It loses the shape she remembers.
Too lonely to hope for food or a dad,
the child chalks a note on the pavement
she fears will open beneath her knees...
I travel lightly with my dogs
on sidewalk that cannot crack, inventing
the person who wrote, “I love you.”
ISBN 1-59661-136-7
39 pages/$9
Mark Taksa’s poetry artfully portrays challenging experience in some of the most profound work I’ve read in thirty years of publishing American poets. Solutions are hinted in a magic only Mark accomplishes in a signature use of language. He models a double indemnity for a poetry that means, after all, in addition to being for its own sake. Taksa’s poetry can change lives. If after reading just one of his books, you don’t agree, it would be an insult to yourself. Mark Taksa’s poetry will live long in American letters.
--Jennifer Bosveld,
Pudding House Publications
Mark Taksa’s poems are haunting. Their words twist off convention in singable dreams. Those dreams—vivid, riddling, hypnotic—evoke the lunar menace, toothy pleasures, that evanescent sense of overall meaning that swims beneath the surface of the world in which we “really” live.
--Richard Silberg,
Poetry Flash
The expressive power of Mark Taksa’s verse is derived from familiar cadences and the directness of colloquial speech, but the surreal juxtapositions in The Invention of Love offer up an agelessness by which the familiar and the immediate are disassembled. On the basis of these idiosyncracies, Taksa forges a new grammar that rescues reality and redeems its language from the threat of its own jagged blade.
--Jerry Bradley,
Concho River Review
The cover photo was taken by Cheryl A. Townsend, who owns the copyright, and was used with her permission