Vernal by Kateri Kosek
Vernal by Kateri Kosek
In this single, segmented poem, the speaker wanders the woods and fields near her New England home, navigating the ephemeral, intoxicating landscape of spring and new desire. She is attuned to both the waves of spring migrants and her own impulses, which sometimes get her into trouble, but she follows both, finding and leaving trails, sometimes “reckon[ing] by the singing of birds.” In free verse, prose, and modified prose, Vernal explores themes of hiding, trespassing, and getting lost. Guiltily, boldly, the poet searches for ground—in both a personal and ecological sense—amid a mosaic already carved with “a thousand invisible paths.”
Publisher: Split Rock Press
ISBN: 978-1735483962
Release date: November 1, 2023
Page count: 31
Size: 5 x 8
Format: Paperback
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kateri Kosek is the author of American Eclipse, winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Orion, Terrain, Catamaran, Creative Nonfiction, Briar Cliff Review, and Northern Woodlands Magazine. She teaches college English and mentors in the MFA program at Western CT State University, where she earned an MFA. She has been a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Tallgrass Artist Residency in Kansas. She lives in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts, and serves on the board of the Center for Northern Woodlands Education.
PRAISE for VERNAL
In Kateri Kosek’s Vernal—a poem linked in sections, in language as spare as it is unsparing—we find the speaker tracking and not tracking herself through an ever-shifting landscape, full of wonders and hidden dangers, along the knife-edge of desire. Her intimacy with this landscape of woods and fields and mud and birdsong feels sensuous and mysterious, as all intimacies do, bringing us simultaneously near to death and to the possibility, always tenuous, of rebirth, of love, of home. This is quietly breath-taking work.
— Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem
In Vernal, Kateri Kosek offers us footprint, birdcall, snowmelt, and riverrun through open places suffused with glimpses of intimacy. These quiet poems remind us that it still is possible to find the good solitude, but also that quiet and solitude carry distance inside them. Vernal leaves us wandering the fields between where we think we should be and where we find ourselves.
— Brian Clements, poet and editor
