For the Love of Endings by Ben Purkert comes out tomorrow! It’s a debut poetry collection about how it feels to lose your planet, your lover, yourself… and that’s all we’re gonna say because we don’t want to spoil it. We asked the author how he’s celebrating.

I’ll spend the day of my book’s publication, March 6th, as I always imagined I would: packing a suitcase in preparation for Tampa. For the Love of Endings comes out right before AWP, and so I’ll be confronting all kinds of pressing questions: Are shorts appropriate for a book signing? How much madras is too much? 

The honest truth is, I’m not sure how I’ll feel when my book is officially out in the world. There will be excitement, definitely, but also relief. For some writers, the first book happens quickly; for others, it can take a few years. I belong to that latter category. You begin to doubt whether the book will ever come to fruition. I’ve come to realize that the title, For the Love of Endings, speaks to many different things, one of them being my own desire for closure with the book itself. 

I like how Ocean Vuong describes the experience of publishing a book: “I see it as a raft that I get to send down a beautiful river, but I can’t be on that raft because I can’t create there anymore… So I see myself standing by the shore and sending my little book off.” When I get back from Tampa, the official book launch will be held at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on Monday, March 19th. (7pm! Free wine and cheese! All are welcome!) I feel like that’s when the raft will really be sent on its way. And then it’s time to start creating again.

Ben Purkert teaches creative writing at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds degrees from Harvard and NYU, where he was a New York Times Fellow. For more information, you can go to his author website or follow him on Twitter @BenPurkert.