Close by

the long version

Gigi Marks's poems are intimate, in fact they explore intimacy as their primary concern, probing our desire to find ourselves reflected in an other, to sometimes give ourselves over to that other. In this sense, they are reminiscent of Dickinson; they stay close to home while urgently querying the borders of the human. The 'other' in these poems, the 'you,' might be a lover, might be a child, might be a flower or a bee, or might be the reader herself, for the poems gesture outward from a speaker who is "waiting to see you," a speaker who wants to, in "seeing you" discover her own self liquid, widening: "I am / not one of them, I am."'