“There are a lot of self-portraits or faux self-portraits in my forthcoming book, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, as the title might suggest. In this poem, I had been thinking about unusual self-portraits, in particular portraits at the moment of death (rare) as opposed to those at the moment of birth (legion). And I began wondering if death were not something new but later something intimately known; the comfortable welcoming place we were before we were born.”
—Dean Rader