The Last Time I Saw You by Diane Elayne Dees

Legacy is always a heavy weight to bear. A person’s life offers so many gifts, so much insight and influence, that the debt is difficult to repay. Diane Elayne Dees more than carries that load in her new collection, The Last Time I Saw You, which memorializes the life and impact of New Orleans photographer and art critic Eric Bookhardt. Intimate and earnest, these poems find the best ways to honor the memories and life of a loved one.

–Jack B. Bedell, author of Color All Maps New, Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019

What’s really difficult to take is the realization that the last time you saw an old friend whom you haven’t hung with in a while—how quickly and finally that person passes from your life, with no repeat performance, no write-up, no review. Diane Elayne Dees owns that feeling in The Last Time I Saw You. Her poems are a long letter to her late friend, art critic Eric Bookhardt, floating her grief through balmy sea to sky.

—Dennis Formento, poet, editor of Mesechabe: The Journal of Surregionalism

Great poetry can be both intensely intimate and extensively relevant to a wider audience. Such is the case with The Last Time I saw You, a collection of 31 poems by poet Diane Elayne Dees, which passionately explores the universal human emotions surrounding lifelong friendship and the inevitable loss which ultimately must be endured.

In Dees’s collection, the deceased friend is a stranger to the reader, yet she invites you in to grieve and reflect alongside her. The reader will quickly progress from politely attentive to thoroughly invested, as the poet’s skillful exploration of grief and recollection will give readers an unapologetically authentic and often relatable experience. I empathized with the speaker at every page turn and expect other readers will do the same. I wholeheartedly recommend this collection.

–Randal A. Burd, Jr., author of Memoirs of a Witness Tree