Dear Herb Leibowitz, my Parnassus Poppa, the pressure you’ve put on my words has made me ever more committed to lucidity and to music. I have no patience for trying to make a sentence harder than it should be. The effort goes into making the sentence clear, simple. You taught me that. You and Susan opened your home to me, made me soup when I was down, and generally have been my surrogate family. Thank you, I love you.

I thank Tom Waits for believing in my poems. Tom, you were the first artist I ever took in the complete work of. I found you at age twelve, and by age thirteen I’d heard everything you’d ever released, and could sing Alice and The Black Rider cover to cover. You shaped my sense of beauty and mystery more than anyone else on the planet has. And I thank Nina Simone for teaching me that I wish I could feel how it is to be free. My time spent with you, Tom and Nina, has given me faith that a human voice can reach right into another’s heart.

I thank Brave Stan Possick, shrink of my days and nights. There were many times I almost lost my life to my grief, and your compassion pulled me back. And I thank Abraham Bartel for taking me through the crucible of cancer, and teaching me how to leap to my own defense with psychotherapy, CBT, really whatever it was that could do me right in that particular moment. I thank Herbert Eveloff, my childhood shrink, for making existentialism comprehensible to a hysteric nine-year-old, and for teaching me what a wonderful thing therapy is. I thank Stuart Ende for loving me and my words and caring for my brain in this last little spell of time.

So many people were incredible editors on this book and/or the poems in it. Justin Boening, you wrecked and rocked this book. And thanks to Ava Kofman, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, Ethan Kuperberg, Suleika Jaouad, Dan Attanasio, Noah Warren, Will Brewer, my beautiful thesis workshop team—especially Hannah Rogers—and Jonathan Galassi, Ngozi Ukazu, Russell Bennetts, Abby Schulman, Carlie Hoffman, Sandy McClatchy, Eliza Schrader, and Kathleen Ossip.

I thank my doctors, who have kept me alive to write this book. Paul Meyers, Melinda Merchant, Michael Laquaglia, Suzanne Wolden, David Schrump, Peter Boasberg, Robert and Kathy McKenna, Charles Forscher, Kumar Sankhala, Sunil Sharma, John Nemunaitis, Jim O’Dorisio, Stephen Lesnick, Gary Kupfer, and Patrick Grohar.