Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Openbound: Poems of Relation

Openbound: Poems of Relation

Donaldson, Jeffery

Paperback

Series: Hugh MacLennan Poetry

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $19.95

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 27, 2026

ISBN10: 0228029317
ISBN13: 9780228029311
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Oct 27 2026
Pages: 88
Language: English

The trouble with honesty, it has no / final answers, leaves you in the cranny / where nothing left unknown meets finding out.

The puzzles of poetry and marriage are these: How to hold on to what you also release? How to protect love when other loves are put between? In this collection of sixty-nine fifteeners - sonnet-like constellations of five tercets - Jeffery Donaldson explores the outcomes of both questions over the course of a life in verse and a loving thirty-one-year open marriage.

The poems orbit around two readings that Donaldson and his wife chose for their wedding: a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke about two people protecting one another's solitude; and a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince in which the prince is told, You are responsible for your rose.

As openbound turns toward open marriage itself - its risks, its revelations, its misunderstandings, its wounds under cultural scrutiny - the work reveals itself foremost as a book of love poems, continuing Donaldson's long devotion to a metaphoric both/and poetics capacious enough to hold loving and freedom in the same breath.

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