Read these poems. Read them, and be prepared to enter an astonishing world in which you already live. This world is full of the familiar: rhododendron leaves, mourning doves, soup from a can. This world is full of the wondrous: supersonic play, ice fog, helical splines. What you cannot prepare yourself for is the alchemy of a Chuck Tripi poem, which will leave you saying of the familiar, “I never knew,” and of the wondrous, “Of course, it must be so.”

In this new world of yours, as you read these poems, you will barrel-roll, melt, drift, scatter, bob, turn, return, dance, stumble, swoon, fall, rise, land, ride, teeter, spin, dream, crave, crash, wake, yearn—but these are the names for sensations you already know, having lived in this world for so many years. In these poems, you will recognize the names of things you have been learning all your life. You will be introduced to your own senses, to your own mind. In “Drifting,” you will be taken like a little boat, subject to the tides and winds:

Into its happy objects the mind goes

as a little, drifting boat in sunlight

might be taken, this way in morning,

that way toward night, its captain

with his hat brim down over his eyes,

shirtless, no lotion, half asleep, free.

Jean LeBlanc

Newton, New Jersey, U.S.A

December, 2012