This is a swath of eighteen poems selected from my Grit Bliss collection, which I’m delighted to say has been compared by a past editor-in-chief of The Paris Review to the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s Le Fleurs du mal, not as much for its subject matter as for breadth of scope, all the while weaving threads that harmonize what it means to be a human being, and one operating in the world. I see the collection as making friends with my shadow by way of first meeting as enemies who marginally respected and greatly feared each other. In this way, like Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Grit Bliss walks through the devil on out into Rumi’s field beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing. Major influences on my poetry are W.S. Merwin, W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, and at the top of my list sits Wendell Berry, of whose work I read one poem each morning.