He Looked Beyond My Faults and Saw My Needs

Poetry. "Someone walks around town, sees things and writes them down. He remembers what people say to him: 'The planes kept going / transporting a strange cargo, bodies packed in ice and oranges.' He might be furtive: 'Try not to look at the others, / on the way in, and out.' He knows that 'the world is made up of little stories' in which dreams and everyday events switch places. The movie might make no sense, but the poetry of Leonard Gontarek sure does. It makes sense the way 'Everything [is] heightened in the crosshairs of God.' And that is the kind of sense you need these days to get on in a world where 'someone dressed as a funeral director [keeps] dropping a hand in your lap/in a movie theater.'"—John Yau