Last February I flew to N.Y. with Jan FitzHenry to see Christo’s Gates project. We had a memorable lunch with your wife, Holly, and my family at the boathouse in Central Park. Jan gave me a copy of the Millennial Pedestrian in March.

This morning I received an email from Jan directing me to this site. Now I feel compelled to comment because the poem above is the exact same one I read when I first flipped through the pages of your book. In fact, it was the only poem I read that first time. I liked it very much. It stayed with me. I took from it both a strong visual image and a strong sense of the awkward moment…and getting past it. I’m not articulating it well but you certainly did.

Millennial Pedestrian sat with a pile of books by my bed since last March. As a librarian, I select the fiction for my library. This means that I sample a lot of new authors and have a lot of “required” reading. The books that I own seem to languish at the bottom of the pile while I read the ones with the due dates. I finally sat down and read through most of your book in mid-December. I thought at the time that I needed to spend more time with it after Christmas.

Jan threw a wine-tasting party on New Years Day. We guests were required to write down a new year’s resolution and seal it in an envelope with our name on the front. Next year, we’ll have to ‘fess up as to whether we kept our resolutions or not. The point is that my resolution was simple… to read more poetry. You and your collection of poems are the reason I made that resolution. Thank you for them.

Barb H.
Sycamore, Illinois