The title poem of this collection, “No Bones to Carry,” was written after the Bali bombing on 12 October 2002 killed 202 people including a colleague of the poet at the Jakarta International School. In its first publication in an American journal, the poem ends after the line in which elephants pick up the bones of their deceased “and carry them off.” Their funereal procession was meant to underscore, by contrast, the cruelty--the worse-than-brute bestiality--of humans who murder so thoroughly they leave no bodies over which survivors can mourn. But later, the poet found that that conclusion underestimates the power of memory and of memorialization. Those in Indonesia have not forgotten that tragedy or those lost in it—just as those in the poet's home town of New York City recall still those who died in the twin towers one year and one day before the Bali bombs exploded.

The poem, as it appears in this volume, recognizes that in our own way, we can be as tender as elephants. There may be no bones to carry, but there are names, and there are words. We pick them up; we carry them with us. We carry them forward.

All the poems in this collection remember places in Indonesia and Asia by remembering its people, the dead and the living.

Writing a poem is a strangely selfless act. Although the motivation for starting a poem is often a deeply personal feeling of loss or pain or confusion or joy that must be expressed, the poem will make its own demands on the poet. The poem wants clarity; the poem wants beauty; the poem wants to become a medium through which one individual experience can be communicated over miles and years to be felt by unknown “generations.” And so the poet must come to care more about the poem than about the intimate emotion that gave it inspiration. In this way, poetry heals--not by disremembering, but rather by revising memory into a palpable presence. One that can be shared. Poetry immortalizes.

These poems are the bones this poet carries.