Reading “I Love You” by Jenny George
Poetry Lunch S6E10
Reading “I Love You” by Jenny George from After Image, Copper Canyon Press.
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Simple language on an impossible topic — love, and our desperate need for it, from our first moments living to our last moments dying. And who’s to say how many moments there are between those? Nobody knows.
I’d like to think we all have a good connotation to “whatever mothers us” but it feels complicated for me, and makes me really sad thinking about an infant’s “I love you” also sounding like “don’t leave me” — and those who get left no matter their pleas.
I really appreciate how this poem hones in to such a specific moment and then breaks open, leaping back through time to the smallness of all of our selves wanting to love and be loved.
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Related print
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Links to purchase
Get the Book: After Image and the print: Reprieve.
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About the Author
Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. George lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy. You can read more on her Poetry Foundation site here!
