I searched the near thousand emails April sent to me throughout the duration of our friendship for a glossary of sorts, for a history of her relationship with specific words that appear in “After Vermont, My Hipster Hunter’s Cap,” sensing that if I could curate her poem with her labor, both as a writer and a person who shaped herself—if I could find the right shape notes, as it were—that we might sing ever more loudly together in celebration with and of April. By sharing language April shared with me privately—verse-filled emails (hence the slashes in the annotations for concision’s sake) in which she articulates being in the world and her ever-evolving writerly philosophy—I hope to gesture toward what she would call “an accurate and lovely ‘reading’ that makes a kind of conversational circle . . . with jumps and gaps in it . . . ”
S. U.
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