I am biased toward all of the poets I introduce, but in Lori Lubeski’s case I am especially so. She’s been my friend for more than two decades. In many a college classroom, we passed notes to each other and wrote notebook collaborations, and I used to ride on the back of her motorbike up and down the hills of San Francisco. In addition to these notable distinctions, Lori is the author of Trickle, Sweet Land, Attractions cf. Distractions, and Dissuasion Crowds the Slow Worker. Her poetry is among the most heartfelt and sometimes heartbreaking I have ever heard.

When I think of her poems, I am reminded of my favorite Hans Christian Andersen story, “The Garden of Paradise.” It is about a learned young prince who is permitted, courtesy of the East Wind, to visit that garden, where he meets the radiant and lovely Fairy of Paradise. He is so enchanted with her and her beautiful palace that he asks if he might stay there forever. She says that he may, with one strict condition:

Every evening, when I leave you, I shall be obliged to say, ‘Come with me,’ and to beckon to you with my hand. But you must not listen, nor move from your place to follow me; for with every step you will find your power to resist weaker. If once you attempted to follow me, you would soon find yourself in the hall, where grows the tree of knowledge, for I sleep beneath its perfumed branches. If you stooped over me, I should be forced to smile. If you then kissed my lips, the garden of paradise would sink into the earth, and to you it would be lost.

Of course, on the very first night that she beckons him, he follows her, “the blood rushing “wildly in his veins,” into the tree of knowledge, where…

The fairy threw off her dazzling attire, bent back the boughs, and in another moment was hidden among them.

“I have not sinned yet,” said the prince, “and I will not;” and then he pushed aside the boughs to follow the princess. She was lying already asleep, beautiful as only a fairy in the garden of paradise could be. She smiled as he bent over her, and he saw tears trembling out of her beautiful eyelashes.

The swollen emotion of that moment — at once so full of desire and pain and folly and inexorability — the trembling of those diamandine fairy tears — the reader’s desire at that moment to shout to him, NOOOOOO, even as you might to a person about to throw himself off a cliff, or who has just milliseconds earlier given himself over to those forces of gravity — this charged and overladen heart-heavy moment (which I read over and over and over as a child) is the very one out of which the Lori’s poems, with no small urgency, come forth.

More extraordinary is that they come out of her, physically, in a voice at once honeyed, gravelly, musky and husky, almost paragendered — quite unique among my contemporaries, and totally unforgettable. Her voice, which you will soon have the privilege of hearing, was even a point of commonality between me and Gary, who in the early stages of our correspondence confessed to an intense infatuation with it

I am certain that you are now on the edge of your seats. Without further delay, let us push back the boughs and welcome my dear pal, Lori Lubeski.