Letters to _____; or Restless Quintet, by David Boeving

Poetry, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Written across five nights to an unnamed addressee who’s quarantined “in the other room,” Letters to _____; or, Restless Quintet documents the worries, frustrations, and affections of someone struggling to sleep while someone they love struggles to breathe.

Grasping for connection through what’s audible—coughing that sounds like “slate crumbling” or “a stump a saw splits”—this series of five letter-poems drifts dizzyingly through associations – linking well-wishes and pleas for recovery with concerns of climate change, community safety, commercialism, and household chores.

Including prose exploring the intersection of trauma, disease, insomnia, and poetic form, Letters to _____; or, Restless Quintet asks how writing can help us make sense of experiences that “seem senseless.”

“An exquisitely moving vigil. Intense in its solitary reverie. Boeving’s Letters read like a waking dream of longing and love.”  

—Rob Halpern, author of Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World.

David Boeving (they, them) is a writer, a teacher, and a psychotherapist. David has earned an MA in Creative Writing, and an MSW in Clinical Social Work. They teach at Eastern Michigan University, tutor writing in the Huron Valley Women’s Correctional Facility, and work with a community team to produce wellness-focused writing content through YpsiWrites' Write for Wellness initiative. David lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan with their spouse.