A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Forty-Eight

I am looking through my poetry to find work for a new manuscript.  At the moment, I am particularly seeking out poems with animals in them, which is honestly not all that limiting, as I do put animals in a lot of my poems.  It is a theme that emerged quite naturally, and is something I have considered building a collection around before, although it came about rather organically.  I actually have some help to work on this project, which is always a boon, as it can be hard to look at the work on my own.  I do have the advantage that I write so much that I often don't even remember many of my poems, so I can sometimes look at them and have a very clear sense of what is or is not working.   At the moment, the real goal has to be just to find the work and bring it together and then we can begin to stitch it into a larger work.  For me, the point of creating a book of poetry is to really bring the individual elements together to create something cohesive that draws upon the individual poems and allows them to build together into something greater.

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