Naming the Heartbeats

This poem by Aimee Nezhukumatathil celebrates the intimate places love can take us in language, from the treasured sweetness of pet names for our children and beloveds to the delightfully strange collective nouns applied to groups of animals. At the poem’s end, she considers the nameless, liminal states between waking and sleeping, those unnamed spaces that connect human and animal alike.

The small, 9-inch by 6-inch broadside seen here was created by the Poetry Center as a thank you for the Walt Whitman Circle members who support and sustain the Center’s work. The broadsides were printed letterpress at the Jack Sinclair Letterpress Studio in the University of Arizona School of Art.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Naming the Heartbeats [Walt Whitman Circle broadside]. Tucson: The University of Arizona Poetry Center, 2017.