dedications

Book dedications offer readers a glimpse into the writer’s social life, their family, community, or audience - those who inform and motivate their writing and of whom they put their writing in service. Speaking on a distinct register from their text, the author alerts us readers to the lives, reciprocities, and aspirations to which, however incidentally, we are now connected.

To read, to learn, to know is then to also go beyond the economy of reading and encounter love. This project seeks to illuminate the many loves that have presided over and shaped us, more than we can know. For dedications, I asked my friends to contribute poems made from dedications pulled from their bookshelves, and did the same. With these poems, we show how much of ourselves we inherit and belong to one another.