In a wide range of lyrically rich poems, award-winning poet Jonathan Fink interrogates the perpetual mysteries and resonances at the convergence of national identity, historical influence, and personal experience.
In Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart, Jonathan Fink interweaves a welcome range of poetic styles including expansive, narrative poems, shorter, lyrical poems, and intricate one-sentence poems that are sustained over multiple pages to deliver his most intimate collection to date. Charting changing national and personal landscapes, Fink’s writing explores such diverse subjects as growing up in West Texas at the conclusion of the Cold War; ekphrastic poems about the paintings of Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum art theft; the intuitive language he shares with his infant daughter on a quiet evening before she falls asleep; and the famous story of a suicide prevented on the George Washington Bridge—the jumper stayed by the man who tells him, “Don’t do it–we love you, my heart.” The imperative, urgent compassion conveyed in the stranger’s command thrums through all the poems in this collection, compelling the reader outward to deeper connections and lived empathy.
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Praise for Don’t Do It–We Love You, My Heart
Jonathan Fink’s Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart is a marvel of a book. Whether meditating on the historic or the personal (or moving effortlessly between both at once), these poems always show a sophisticated mind in action, deftly moving between the private and public moment, making connections, and reaching for meaning in a way few poets can. In these pages, “Like the brush of a fingertip across still water,” the border between memory and the present moment is as mysterious as it is profound. – Matthew Olzmann, author of Constellation Route
Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart, is not only the title poem for this outstanding collection, but also the mantra that radiates throughout it. Although Jonathan Fink’s poems are not blind to the atrocities humans have inflicted on one another—and the earth itself—the poems resist the tendency to relegate all as a lost cause. One of Fink’s great skills is weaving the transcendent with the everyday such as in the poem “A Year of Growth” that discusses the loss of a beloved grandmother during the construction of a child’s treehouse, the act “intersecting now with her loss / as grief permeates all things.” Often dotted with self-deprecating humor and an uncanny ability to merge seemingly dissimilar topics such as Groucho Marx with Venus rising from the sea on a giant scallop shell, Fink’s Whitmanesque-vision is ever-expansive in a way that demonstrates our shared humanity. At the core of this powerful collection is the underlying insistence in the unlimited power of human resilience—and poetry itself. – Charlotte Pence, Academy of American Poets 2024 Laureate Fellow and author of Code
Press for Don’t Do It — We Love You, My Heart
Poets&Writers
The Florida Review
LitHub
Verse Daily
Poetry at The Dali
JONATHAN FINK 