If a poem holds only what we already understand and are comfortable with, we wouldn’t need the poem. Not to write it, not to read it. What we need poems for is their way of pressing beyond certainty, arrogance, and comfort. When we are unseated from ego’s throne, and we still have to find a way to live, when there is no chair or floor under us, what do we do? We look for what isn’t made of the simplest kinds of wood, glue, and joints. A poem is made of this world’s wood, glue, and joints—it’s still language, it’s still words, it still draws from our bodies and minds and this planet’s entire banquet of material and emotional and conceptual richness—but a poem is words somehow doing things that words can’t quite do. This allows us to think the unthinkable, to feel the unfeelable thing, to find ourselves and the world dismantled and continue to breathe, to live.