Joyful Orphan: Poems

Through poems of witness, species and habitat extinction, war, pandemic, technology, history, and race, Mark Irwin’s elegant collection of poetry explores the collision between metropolis and wilderness, and engages with forms of spirit that cannot be bound. With the incursion of electronic communication, our connections with one another have been radically distorted. Irwin’s poems confront what it means to be human, and how conflict, along with the interface between technology and humanity, can cause us to become orphaned in many different ways. But it is our decision to be joyful. Excerpt from “Letter” Times when we touch hope like the hem of a cloud just as when we touch a body or door, or think of the dead come back, romancing us through the warp of memory, lighting a way by luring . . .