I Ask This Favor, as Any Person Might

I Ask This Favor, as Any Person Might

I Ask This Favor, as Any Person Might is a radiant, unguarded collection of syllabic sonnets that marries spiritual inquiry with the wreckage and wonder of aging, grief, and everyday astonishment. Harvey Lillywhite’s décasyllabic lines speak out across open graffiti walls—tight, urgent, improvisational—on which thought, confession, and metaphysics tag their luminous signatures. These poems push against the old Imagist injunction to pack ideas into “things”; here, ideas stride openly, companioned by image rather than constrained by it. The result is a deeply human voice both vulnerable and playful, capable of leaping from cosmology to childhood trauma, from quantum entanglement to kitchen-table sorrow, without losing its emotional center. What emerges is a long prayer stitched from humor and bewilderment, philosophical candor, and a stubborn tenderness toward the world. These sonnets feel like final testaments and fresh beginnings at once—torii gates between the broken and the holy, the fleeting and the eternal.