The Lamp of Revision

Joshua Edwards

Later, when those mysteriouswords would again possess you,desire and ideas from yesterdaycould cause familiar peopleto seem imaginary. The zodiacwas useless, hours were ancient,memory was just memory.You began with the thoughtto improve what you had made,but then maybe it would bebetter abandoned altogether,to try and make something new.So here you are, beginningagain what you'd once believedwas finished. Present pleasuresanchored in the past, you walkacross a familiar landscape and arrive at a new mountain,as if there were such a thing. Never sad, never powerless,you are a climber whose formof joy would go on and everupward to murmur strangeopinions into a thinning sky.

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Born on Galveston Island, Joshua Edwards lives in New York City and West Texas. He’s the author of a half-dozen books, the most recent of which is The Double Lamp of Solitude, and his co-translation (with Lynn Xu) of Lao Yang’s Pee Poems was just published by Circumference Books. He co-edits Canarium Books and teaches at Pratt Institute and Columbia University.

cover of The Double Lamp of Solitude

Galveston, Texas

Emerging from walks taken by the author from the birthplaces to the deathsites of three poets (Friedrich Hölderlin, Federico García Lorca, and Miguel Hernández), The Double Lamp of Solitude is a collection of poems, prose, translations, and images that meditate on time, relationships, reading, society, and solitude.

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