Dears, Beloveds
By Kevin Phan
SERIES:
Mountain West Poetry Series
University Press of Colorado, Center for Literary Publishing
The prose poetry in Kevin Phan’s first collection, Dears, Beloveds, offers a fine-grained meditation on grief—personal, familial, ecological, and political. Informed by the author’s engagement with Buddhism & mindfulness, the poems address looming absences: in our vanishing earth, the scraps of a haunting voicemail, or waiting at hospice with little to do. In these pages, the poet fights his way out of isolation, to establish filigrees of connectedness with himself, other humans, and the natural world. Whether meditating on the bodily loss of his cancer-stricken mother, the Black Lives Matter movement, or a shadow falling from a speck of dust in the kitchen, these lines are notable for their crisp and surprising movements, lucid imagery, aching tenderness, & humanity. Dears, Beloveds reminds us of the ironies, beauty, and complexity of our time on earth, as beings in time. Where we hurt. Where we heal each other.
Kevin Phan is a graduate of the University of Iowa as well as the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. His chapbook “Closing Waves” was published in the Fall 2019 issue of Black Warrior Review. Poems from this collection have appeared in the Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He lives in northern Colorado.
