In Everything I Touch Is—& Isn’t—You, David Allen Sullivan and Ignatius Valentine Aloysius engage in a daring poetic conversation, weaving poems from one another’s lines and inventing new collaborative forms. Written in a time of political fracture, the poems insist on attention, tenderness, and survival. The collection moves through grief, love, politics, and bearing witness, dissolving the boundaries between self and other to reveal a shared, living voice.
"In a series of linguistically embroidered conversations between the poets—or rather the language of the poems—the “I” and the “you” retain their lyrical specificity while also giving way to a semiotics of self that creates a vaster, osmotic space for the interchange of selves. Reminiscent of the familiar weavings of another collaborative duo—Lennon/McCartney’s stitched songs at the end of Abbey Road—Aloysius and Sullivan sew their self-created patterns with a golden thread at once intentional and mysterious. Like two focused tailors in a fairytale, their musical stitchery creates shapeshifters’ cloaks you’ll want to wear, and unpredictable rhythms you’ll want to hear."—Roxi Power, The Songs That Objects Would Sing. Co-editor of Winter in America (Again : Poets respond to 2024 Election)
"What we are witnessing in this collaboration is an intimacy that welcomes our intrusion, a sacred conversation that doesn’t shy away from an inquisitive audience. This book wanders through questions of mortality, beauty, survival, and love, unfolding in real time with the natural epiphanies and digressions that happen when we lead with curiosity. The end result? A manual on inspiration and what happens when artists are open to be led by language, and by each other."—Taylor Byas, Resting Bitch Face
"Sullivan and Aloysius shower readers with immersive details and powerful insights while they showcase innovative forms. Poems in this volume are woven as part of their design, yet the seams are often invisible until further examination. Sullivan and Aloysius collaborate, and so do the poems themselves, Golden Shovels joined by invented forms named Golden Shoots & Ladders and Golden Sliver. What results is an exhilarating exploration of language and a reinvention of the poetic conversation. As “Dissolve in the Flickering Neon” advises, “The mind’s a dry match / that first sets itself on fire, to master it / once & show how it’s done.”"—Mary Biddinger, The Girl with the Black Lipstick
"Everything I Touch Is—& Isn’t—You is a master class in poetic generosity and formal ingenuity as our two poets compose together their musical conversation—a call and response. Each poem in sequence is an homage to the previous poem, as one poet takes words and sentences from the other to reimagine what was already conjured. And so creative origins are dissolved into one lavish poem after another, written ultimately by neither poet, or by both simultaneously. “Sometimes, it gets hard to live...& stay in the body’s house,...its ghosts singing of my self-evacuation from the homeland,” plays off of: “I’m a paltry host without my caravan of ghosts.” The title suggests that everything here is—and isn’t “you.” Who else could it be? This wonderful book offers many intriguing possibilities."—Brad Crenshaw, Chased by Lunacies and Wonders, 2023
