Laid beneath a tree and read John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, forthcoming from NYRB Classics— with an introduction by Richard Deming — and felt poetry oozing upward beneath it. Written in the key of epistolary, it is a beautiful book about what poetry does, and what poetry can do. Might even be my favorite by Berger… but maybe spring is to blame.

An excerpt:

“Suppose a character, in one of the stories you and I write, tried to conceive of his origin, and tried to foresee beyond what he knows of his destiny at any given point of the story. His enquiries, his speculations, would lead him to hypotheses (infinity, chance, indeterminacy, free will, curved space and time . . .) very similar to those at which thinkers arrive when speculating about the universe.

This is why the traffic between storytelling and metaphysics is continuous.”