Somewhere my father must be
eating the mooshy parts of a peach
as a favor for a child,
the way he once did for me.
May it be sunny there, and a lei
of light illumine his brow.
The years it's taken to learn sweetness
resides in the bruises.
"Capacious in its imagination, flexible in its range of social reference, wise, funny, and profoundly engaged in the complex ethics of private conscience and global citizenship, Fuchsia in Cambodia continues the astonishing trajectory of Roy Jacobstein's earlier work. Who else among us can write with equal authority about assembly lines in Detroit, bullock carts and prayer wheels in Tibet, urban topography in Washington DC, the blessing ceremony for a newly adopted daughter in Cambodia, the stricken tediums of adolescence, the tender anxieties of fatherhood, the shame and burlesque and serendipity of contemporary political life, the resilience of human affection? New in the present volume is a richly augmented technical range: moving from an expansive colloquial line to stern monometer, from thumbnail narrative to kaleidoscopic reverie to movie pitch, these poems are a source of joy."— Linda Gregerson
