The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots, by Ned Balbo

The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots is a book of radical transformations. Reinventions of poems by Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and Rimbaud sing alongside poems that interrogate and transform the poet’s own history, in which biological and adoptive families intersect, secrets abound, and the past ripples across the present. Grappling with family ties as snarled as a fishing line, “a tangle to endure,” these poems are marvelous for their emotional and narrative complexity—that such complexity is rendered in perfectly wrought poetic forms makes them even more impressive. “Is it a gift to hold you as he did?” the speaker asks his birth father’s compass, an emblem of memory and loss. For the reader who holds this book, the product of a complex past and a richly-lived present, the answer can only be yes.—Chelsea Rathburn Please note: Member price includes shipping. Ned is happy to inscribe and autograph this for you. Just include a note as to whom you'd like the book inscribed.