Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf and Small Gods of Grief, which was awarded the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001. Her third poetry collection, A New Hunger, was selected as an ALA Notable Book in 2008. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, she's had poems in reviews such as The Washington Post, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, Harvard Review and many others. Her poems have also been widely anthologized. She is herself the editor of four anthologies: Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars; Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles and Renegades; Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the Cities and Never Before: Poems About First Experiences.

When Steve Huff at Tiger Bark Press asked me to help him assemble poems for I've Come This Far To Say Hello, I had to fight my dread and resistance to go search into Kurt's computer and files, drawers and documents: we were both very private and respectful of each other's boundaries. So imagine—that's all I'll say: just imagine—the emotion I felt when, in a file called "Almost Poems," I found this five-line poem, written at the end of April 2013, two and a half months before Kurt passed away...

The Kiss

That kiss I failed to give you.
How can you forgive me?
The kiss I would have spent on you is still
There, within me. It will probably die there.
But it will be the last of me to die.

for Laure-Anne