Broken Windows

Author: David Need

Publisher: The Bodily Press (2025)

The poems in Broken Windows are from 1994-98. They look back to a spiritual emergency I’d had in my early 20s while living in the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts. I’d had one of those Beatrice love encounters that seems to happen to some poets and that led me to a daily meditation practice (1-3) hours and eventually to pursue graduate work in Buddhist Studies. By the time these poems were written, I’d stopped identifying as a Buddhist and was searching for ways to tell other folks about who I was/what had happened to me. Many of these poems were written as 3-5 minute performance pieces; I’d introduce a poem with a story about one of the impossible things that had happened to me — the three miracles I’d seen, or a story from one of my hitchhiking trips across America. The language in the poems is simple because I was trying to talk about something that isn’t straightforward but matters. —David Need