Please Hold

I have a big TV for streaming.Another documentary on sacred whereabouts.The wounded, working heart - the mostholy site I know. Its beats. Its battered truthsI try to attend, decipher, hold.The woes of the world and of an individual life, the bounteous, raucous, overwhelming beauty of being alive - all of it, including the struggle to believe, is the subject of the poems in Dave Cavanagh's sixth collection, Please Hold. Sadness and uncertainty walk side by side with joy and humor. These poems acknowledge their own limits but manage to emerge with the belief that the irritating phone message we all hear too often, "Please hold," may also be an enjoinder to hang on for the connection to life and each other.