‘Looking Back, September’
— Reneé Bibby
As an editor, I’ll usually seek dark, complicated thickets of language, but Conrad’s clean, direct poem—honed spare and sharp as a blade—sliced me. There’s little embellishment here, a few lines of unadorned statements, “I still remember / the body laid upstairs and / entertaining a stranger in the kitchen.” Each observation, a moment of anguish, layered one on to the other cumulate into a bright and blinding last note. The poem may be small in words, but is big and exquisite in grief.