The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love by Julie Choffel

Like the best songs, Julie Choffel’s The Inevitable Return of What We Do Not Love is a poem fueled by desire. To have “so many / ways to say I want” is dangerous and selfish, we’ve heard: we should be content; we should be grateful. But “women are never / not hungry,” Choffel’s mother-speaker insists, aware that her life plays out as two tracks in the same song—the material world of meals and routines as well as the imaginative realm. Poetry is this “parallel universe,” these “other zones,” this “floor / under the garbage,” these subterranean places where we meet to tend to different hungers. In Choffel’s hands, these spaces bloom with deep seeing and wry humor: “there I go / again     trying to liberate us     from what     we don’t know.” The poem becomes a vehicle for satisfying its own longings, a gift then passed along to us as readers—so that we, too, might dance to such a soundtrack in our kitchens and in the otherworlds that envelop the everyday. If you’re willing to risk being brought back to your own desires, enter The Inevitable Return.

–Becca Klaver