Calendar Year

The title of Julie Agoos’ book Calendar Year is taken from one of the four longer works that make up this collection: these five or six lines/once sketched on the leatherbound notepad; your signature – / a backwards ghost; the fingerprints/ that had belonged to you/ are bodiless and painful/ as an idea/ just out of grasp (from the final lines of the title section). Abandonment relates a similar concern for the intangibility and temporality of being: and last, the black vase sheer and difficult/that stinks of its own reason: we are temporal./ Every inward chance/ breaks free of us.