GAIL TIRONE
BOOKS
The Weight of Addition
An anthology of poets living or working in Texas, edited by Randall Watson
Including: Sandra Cisneros, André de Korvin, John Gorman, Edward Hirsch, Tony Hoagland, Rich Levy, Michael Lieberman, Cynthia Macdonald, Naomi Shihab Nye, Daniel Rifenburgh, Gail Tirone and Adam Zagajewski.
“This is the poet’s work: to bear experience, to hold it, lift it, make of it a gesture and a world, a surface and witness; to make audible our labor and what labors within us: the perpetual arrivals, accretions, small and large — an inheritance transformed and welcomed, a legacy built on and saved. Even abandoned.
This, I hope, is what the reader will find here. An anthology is a kind of community, a network of additions. And poetry is a counter weight to isolation, a span which links the solitude of one person to the solitude of another, and is the transcendent in its impulse and function — and ultimately, a form of generosity.
And so — we have the poems themselves: each a sign and a revelation of our uncommon lives… each an artifact of the spirit, of the inner life… humane and troubled and hopeful and necessary — a mirror in which we might discover not just those things that distinguish us, but those that identify us, that connect us, individually, and what might be called our mutuality, our belonging.”
— from the introduction by Randall Watson