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6.2

Dear Mr. Best,

I have never owned a book of prose poetry. I once asked one of my old creative writing professors to explain it to me. “What’s the difference,” I asked, “between a lyric essay and a prose poem?”

 “What the author calls it,” she said.

Then I heard about—and read—your book of prose poems, But Our Princess Is in Another Castle. Yours is a book with video game referencing, thought provoking, nostalgia-ridden poems that many would assume as gimmicky and focused on childhood, but no. Not this one. This is a collection about more than games and childhood. It’s about love, both romantic and familial. It’s about philosophy and thought. Death and God. Truth, with a capital T, and fiction. “Do not believe me,” you write in the first poem, “Golden Axe.” “Do not believe me.”

But I can’t help it.

What I loved so much about this collection wasn’t the original thread that piqued my interest—my love of video games, old and new, especially old. It was the world creation, the finely crafted sentences that contained multiple meanings, the heart. And, boy, is there is heart in this book. Reading this collection made mine feel heavy at times. Suffocated, even.

In “Mega Man,” you dropped me in the midst of a young romance with a first kiss on a Ferris wheel. The speaker wants to know his future, wants to know whether this love will last, but a man has unplugged the fortune-telling machine. The man hands the speaker a card that he tacks above his bed:  “Being an electrician is different than being a doctor of light.” Yes, this references the creator of Mega Man. But it also foreshadows the last section of the book, Light World, which deals heavily with poems about God.

It’s this layering of your poems that brought be back for seconds, thirds, fourths. And each time I read them, there I am in Heart World, Do World, and the other worlds you have made. The imagery is so visceral it’s hard not to feel as though I am riding the Ferris wheel, pausing at the top to stare into the blinking lights beneath. My heart quickens at the thought of that first kiss.

The end of your collection comes with one last section, Game Over. And there I was, again, a kid at an old arcade cabinet, wishing my brothers had more change to spare. Wishing my initials didn’t sound so much like what we use to sit on a toilet. But I will end this letter just like I ended those sessions when I desired to have my initials at the top of the leaderboards, to have my initials preserved in time, to have my initials mean something.

Yours truly (You Got a New High Score!),

A. A. Singh (AAS)