Look

Look: Love Letters asks us to imagine the interception of the past and present, and how they fit together to create an internal portrait of a person. The poems open a window to the mind of the author who is grappling with their own personal history and the echoes of their lineage. They are the culmination of the confusion of a curious child, and a penchant for obsession. The poems fit together like puzzle pieces, creating a landscape of the author's internal journey through loss. Each short poem is a letter to someone or something that doesn't exist anymore except in memory. They allow for meditation, both by author and reader. They are each a self-contained rumination nostalgic for a past fire that still somehow burns. When Maxx Dempsey writes, "I have seen this... I have done this... I am listening..." I believe in what Maxx Dempsey is saying. In Look: Love Letters, Dempsey tells it like it is, tells it in a way that only Dempsey can. When Dempsey writes, "I have no eyes for the marks I leave," I would rebut this claim by holding up this book, made up of these marks, these words, these syllables, these prose poem scars, with stories hiding behind each one, each story an epistle, each epistle a song.

-Peter Markus, author of When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds