Almost Everything Takes Forever

At the heart of Kirsten Wasson's Almost Everything Takes Forever is yearning, the trope for which is desire for a permanent home. Such desire and an attendant yearning for amorous love are less often fullfilled in the world of these poems than is the love between mother and daughter, mother and son. No matter how threatened by time, such love is a permanent "buoy in lapping distance." How lush are Wasson's poems limning her life with a mother who, like herself, is more at home in otherworldly splendor than in the secure and the conventional. A similar bond is lavishly described in a series of mother-son poems. Even though the poet and her vanishing and reappearing Noah are "a couple whose days are numbered," those days are so memorably present that their once-upon-a-timeness will continue to surface. In "The Long Dive" we are privy to a Gray Whale and her calf that dive and breach in a series of "sky hop[s]." No less in life than off the Monterey coast will Wasson39s eyes fix on her sounding son, catching "a glimpse or two through the long dive."