I thank Sarah Ruhl, my spiritual advisor and this book’s dharma guide. You’ve propped me up with your luminous compassion, and taught me how to be the human I want to be. I promise to reincarnate near you, so that you can keep on teaching me.

I thank Tim Donnelly, my thesis advisor, for being my birthing hospital. Your brilliant mind and eye took a welter of poems and let me see trajectories, root systems, all the implications and complications of who I am and what I am trying to say.

I thank Lucie Brock-Broido, master of my letters, for teaching me how to demand poems, to have my way with them once they had their way with me. Lucie, too, I must thank you for healing my heart with your boundless sensitivity and Herculean patience—I came to Columbia on the verge of giving up on life and left it eager to write and write and write until my life gives out. And it was thanks to the hours you spent teasing me and comforting me that this was so.

I thank Jean Valentine, kooky evil genius of kindness, and the most beautiful laugh I’ve ever heard in my life. You’ve lit me on fire with your warmth, with your poems, with your notes on my poems. The moments spent in Holy Communion with you and Elizabeth, Emily Dickinson etched on the wall and croissants on the table, are some of my most sacred memories.

I thank Cynthia Zarin, the Yankee hook who has pulled me out of self-pity and set me back to writing and loving and thinking more times than I can count. Where would I be without you, Cynthia, who got me to read someone other than Berryman? Who made me pay attention to language’s texture for the first time? Who has made me pasta, and shared with me Beasie Goddu, your daughter, who has become the smarter-than-me little sister I always wanted?

I thank Dottie Lasky, my thunderbird, for whom I wrote my chapbook, AEONS. Dottie, you gave me my first rituals. My whole life is rituals now. My whole life is Dottie. I can’t tell you how much our friendship has meant to me. To be there for you, and to have you there for me. We were never strangers. We were always writing poems together. I love you.