6 Quotes by David St. John

Having your evening coffee overA field guide of trails or alpine blossoms& so I need now to ask youWhich of the old journals did you firstOpen to a map of my long wanderingWhen did you first know I'd come back& how did you find yourself here& how did you know this single lanternYou are reading by was the last possibleLight to lead me home?

When I came to see youIt hurt me how thin you had becomeIn the months of addiction & disease& although your particular abyssWas a man & not a drugThe degradation was the sameThe same wasting of the fleshThe same tapped-out well emptiedOf the least leaf of emotionThe same frozen rage

There were times when depression, anxiety, whatever, would keep me from writing. I still get depressed and anxious, but I just don’t let it stop me. I’ve just learned to move it to one side if I want to work.

It may be that places exist in order that memory itself has a home.

Delicate, gracious, and eloquent, John Brandi’s poems reveal that he remains an extraordinary profound poet of prayer and praise. His is the most honorable and heroic of ambitions – to dress our broken world in the clothes of language, trust, and hope.

Place in writing often exists at that intersection between the reality of place and one’s imagination about that place – what one believes, hopes, or imagines about the various possibilities of oneself in that place.