Early Draft of “A Place”
Early Draft of “A Place," December 24, 2004
This early pencil draft of “A Place,” later published in Elegy (Graywolf Press, 2007), reveals the precision of line that defines the collection. “We will never meet again / Here, drink this little bit of […] water” details a ritual of parting. As The New Yorker, noted, Elegy is “less a dirge than a process, a work of reconstruction—language as scaffolding for the self.”