The Dialogues

At its core, “The Dialogues” is a collection of memories about my past relationships with many people. Instead of traditional plot, something closer to argumentative logic drives the poems. I like this idea of argumentation because it’s more open-ended and makes the reflective moments take on a present-tense voice about the Yankee Candle-esque fragments of the past. I sometimes think of how the poems present memory and nostalgia as a four stage process: There’s the experience as it transpires, the attentional filter that determines what gets remembered, the later nostalgia, and the act of questioning or refusing to question nostalgia’s credibility. A little four act play of Nostalgia v.s. Why Feel Nostalgic? That’s the theory about the book’s tension at least, but the question’s never directly asked and I think rarely answered, serving only as a lead into speculation about what larger effect the collection delivers as a whole. While some of the poems stand alone as reflective and nostalgic moments, others get meaning mostly by proximity