Nude with Anything

Poetry. NUDE WITH ANYTHING, the new collection of James D'Agostino's poems, is breathtaking. "I love these poems, their cathedral-like meditations, their brilliant sentences spiraling like silver necklaces of DNA. Or water falling down successive terraces. That they track, 'the necessary coordinates/ of precisely here, ' is mysterious as a fingerprint, intimate as blood-flow. 'Believing/ nothing, ' D'Agostino says, 'I believed slowly what I could, a little/ ceremony, if even only/ pouring ordinary water one glass to another to feel a thing/ turn into itself again and again.' In biology, recognition occurs when a molecule attaches itself to another whose shape is receptive. D'Agostino's poems move through to thought with that same unerring receptivity; and yet it is equally true that an enormous tenderness drifts through them like the Milky Way"--Nancy Eimer