Sometimes the letter starts before the epigraph: I wasn’t sure where in Foley’s to begin this note. I had your book in hand. I started writing, and took a swerve (“my only swerving”) into my story of the deer. I read until I found the title story with carstruck fox and links of bad luck. A crux: whether to believe in fate (your Hank does, though it helps him not) or luck or deer aggression or invulnerability, or should I address it in a letter (dear aggression), if anything like that can help us live.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note from the writer: "Bored by the slick disposability of ebooks and deletable pdfs, I've spent the last five years loving with the print artifact, haunting libraries of various sorts, writing essays in response to things I found there (a bookplate, a forgotten sentence, a human hair, a found text, homophobic marginalia, an overheard conversation) and publishing them back into the books/libraries where they originated. In 2015 Graywolf will publish Letter to a Future Lover, an unbound and unordered box of these essays, as a limited edition, followed by a bound trade edition."