Tell Me About the Long, Dark Path Home – Foster

If there’s one thing in this world that frightens me, it’s that nobody wants to read. Perhaps it’s self-inflicted, working in a discipline that stakes its name on making people feel stupid for “not getting it.” If Tell Me About the Long, Dark Path Home is any evidence, I am as guilty as any other poet of perpetuating this stigma, if not more so when you compare the accomplishments of all the poets I look up to (the Charles Wrights, the John Ashberrys, the T.S. Eliots) to whatever these poems are meant to signify. 

But I think there’s something to be said for being confusing, and what frightens me is what you give up by asking for straightforward answers to every question. Confusion is poetry’s calling card; it is the cobblestones in the path that brings the reader from comfort to the sensations of every word. It is that first step to communicating all the things I hold in my heart. In writing these poems I spent a lot of time contending with the degree to which I want to reveal the details of these memories. I decided that I would wrap my world in the complexities that reflect their real counterparts. I am many things, and to reduce or reveal them would be ingenuous to both the reader and myself. 

Attached is the collection itself, which is named after an album by The Newfound Interest in Connecticut. Also here is a bibliography of sorts for the final poem, “the mausoleum of all hope and desire,” attached for the reading pleasure of a small fraction of what I imagine to be an already small audience. Enjoy!

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