Impulse to Love Author:Jim Bodeen We keep the strong Black Medicine, coffee./ — We shed the fat of the soldier food./ — We are shirt wearers. We are big-hearted./ — We have been sHADOWmARKED./ — From defeat we have achieved a new fierceness,/ — a new kind of recklessness./ from Mari Sandoz Crazy Horse Camp North Dakota, Chile, Viet Nam. Extreme places. Isolated places. A seizur... more »e calls to poetry from these places. And in each instance it is in these worlds that poems find themselves at home. At home with voices, these poems explore making home among extremes. Everyone is a veteran of these wars. The middle way also makes a prophetic path. Less explored than other celebrated extremes, the border worlds—beginning with the family living room in North Dakota—are the worlds given for exploration in these poems. The borderland worlds can be seen not as marginal, but as heartlands. Returning once more to North Dakota, the birth land, and the land of exile and the mother, these poems get as close to the mother’s voice as possible, this time beginning her body itself. In Chile, surrounded by Mapuche Indians and the birth land of Neruda, guided by the shaman Don Eduardo, the machi, poems encounter Pinochet and his machine guns in a small bookstore containing Neruda and poetry after 20 years of censorship. Viet Nam opens up in the wild ways of the garden. The poems suggest that the war fought in the living room is the same war fought in Viet Nam. These poems map these wild ways, impulses to love.« less