Valentine’s Day in the Mummy Museum by David Allan Cates

Because he is an exceptionally alive human being, David Allan Cates is a one-of-a-kind poet. The pieces of his Valentine’s Day in the Mummy Museum are smart, witty, wise, candid, original, brave, affectionate, imaginative, bold, knowledgeable about the world, and utterly unpretentious.  The best love poems I’ve read in years are in this book–“On a Cliff with You” and “The Purpose of Kissing.”

–David Huddle, author of My Surly Heart, Dream Sender, and Blacksnake at the Family Reunion

Even at his most smart-allecky, Tony Hoagland always held the world open to the messy certitude of his love. David Allan Cates, with VALENTINE’S DAY IN THE MUMMY MUSEUM, is the new bearer of that deeply American affection. Cates’ rough and aching poems are sometimes funny, never smug, and always capable of breaking your heart. Whether bright missives constructed in the beautiful unease of Latin America, or raised in view of the back door of his home in Montana, Cates’ understated poems want so dearly to connect to the ineffable, even when they know it’s impossible, yet go on singing anyway. “Have you written/the lives you love?” Cates asks. Thankfully for us, the answer is yes.

–Christopher Locke, author of WAITING FOR GRACE & OTHER POEMS and TRESPASSERS

The poems in David Cates’ book are valentines, in truth, to the liminal state of being alive. “We invent so we don’t fall off the lobe of now,” he writes. And “There’s a moment when it could go either way.” Every single poem in this collection lives in that dream-like place where the heart must go when it’s grappling with loss, sorrow, and the complexities of love. Every poem remains poised in that iridescent moment. These are rich and sometimes funny poems from a skillful writer who refuses to be embittered, whose mind is forever climbing the ladder of the imagination, never knowing what might happen next.
–Fleda Brown, “author of FLYING THROUGH A HOLE IN THE STORM and THE WOODS ARE ON FIRE”