"At this point my opinion is that a poet should carry death’s imminence with him at all times, the..."

“At this point my opinion is that a poet should carry death’s imminence with him at all times, the way a priest might his black book of extremely small psalms.”

- Franz Wright, closing lines to “History,” from Kindertotenwald: Prose Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011)