Two of Everything

“What a marvelous and singular book: of love lyrics, narratives, conversations, fables, aphorisms, abandoned drafts, journal entries of everyday family life, all permeated by the strange and symbolic, all woven together in a beautiful fugue. The mind that moves through these poems, wondering, mourning, treasuring, recording what night says, is precisely the humbly brilliant, attentive, wry, weird friend you wish for in the world, and can only find in true poetry.”

“Two of Everything is about waiting. When you wait for something for a long time, something that might not come, time gets strange: it becomes a plastic ham, a tennis lob that never drops, a dream baby in a sandwich bag. I love how Sally Keith parcels out time. And I love how the poems don’t imagine adoption as happily-ever-after. If she gets to be a mother, this speaker will never be the Only mother. There will always be another, the first, who, despite best intentions, agreements made and kept, might ‘regret all of it, every bit.’ What a possibility! It haunts the book, but it doesn’t foreclose love. In fact, it allows love—and beauty, and humor.”

“Look. First things first, this book is a page-turner. I mean it! Two of Everything. Of choices. Of desires. Of possibilities and heartbreaks. How does one even know what to hope for? And what does it mean when a dream comes true and then there’s a whole other world of choices ahead of us? What’s love? What if you never get what you want while you’re getting exactly what you asked for? Or not. I sat and read and read and then reread. This book is many books. Many lives. It’s brave. It’s brave to hope and talk about it. What’s important and not been said before in a book of poems? This. I think this is it.”