Love Song: Port & Starboard

I am truly, amazingly for once, speechless. Not because I’m “older than Hippocrates,” or a blue heron just landed on my morning dock, and certainly not because “it’s 5 a.m. in the ER, fluorescent lights buzzing.” No, I am because I just finished reading Ann Chinnis’s Love Song: Port & Starboard and am overwhelmed by the beauty of such profound compassion, the high exalted music of a prophet soul praising “the soft, brown bruise. . . of living.” I don’t fish or boat and am certainly not an ER doctor committed to an endless line of “drenched” emergencies, though now I know what all this feels like. Now I too am wrapped “bashful” in saving lives, and know what love feels like from the deep inside. Now I too want to “grab a handful of mane and fling” myself “onto destiny’s haunches.” This is poetry unlike anyone else’s, songs that praise the living and the dead. Believe me, you too will be speechless.

—Philip Schultz, author, Failureand Pulitzer Prize winner

There but for the grace, one feels, as there with grace, when reading these tactile, heart-breaking poems that embrace the very heart of the human condition. Ann Chinnis strikes a profound balance — more a braiding — of solace and solitude out on the waters of forgiveness, with no small portion of soul-wrenching ashore. One can only wish to have had Ann Chinnis as one’s physician; but the recompence is to have entry into her gorgeous poems. These are poems in full sail, with a poet of extraordinary powers at the tiller. Are they lyrics disguised as narratives, or narratives disguised as lyrics? The answer, most engagingly, is yes. What a balancing act, and what joy to have this gorgeous book in one’s hands!

—Jeffrey Levine, artistic director and publisher, Tupelo Press