Cherish

How strange to be here at all
talking to you like this in a poem—
if only a moment our two psyches
touching.
—from “Passing Thru”

Steve Kowit’s poetry has been described as a “memorable exhilaration, a singular concentration of language, and a flow of razor-sharp images springing irrepressibly from the author’s humanity” (CHOICE). It is his humanity we celebrate in this, Steve’s last collection. Cherish: New and Selected Poems was receiving its final editorial touches by Steve when he passed away in April of 2015.

Steve Kowit—a poet, an editor, a teacher—was 2007 winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection The First Noble Truth and author of other books of poems, including Lurid Confessions, The Dumbbell Nebula, and The Gods of Rapture. He was also author of the influential creative writing workshop text In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop.

“How fine to have in in our hands . . . the lucid, voluptuous, exuberant poems of Steve Kowit.” —Dorianne Laux