Winner of the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize selected by Bob Hicok
$14.00 Paper, 978-0-9754990-3-0
2005 • 96 pp. 6 3/4 x 8"
•Reviews•
•Excerpt•
•About the Author•
Reviews
"[Correspondence is] as intelligent as it is moving, as emotionally astute as it is linguistically mesmerizing..."
—Sima Rabinowitz, Dragonfire
"Correspondence is a book which honors its epigraphs. Quoting Walter Benjamin, Kathleen Graber makes clear that she "takes up the struggle against dispersion." This is a poetry of meditative embrace, which both repairs and celebrates the often chaotic nature of life. Her long lines and slow cadences lend a devotional feel to poems in which the hidden and forgotten are returned to the lyric realm of consciousness. She would hold everything and clarify everything she holds. There is a mending quality to Graber's imagination, a mending of self by extension into the world. This is a wonderful book."
—Bob Hicok, judge
The tool of the genius in the twentieth century, Donald Barthelme once wrote, is rubber cement. Our modes of juxtaposition may be electronic and instantaneous, but the principle's dead-on: meaning arises, in this hour, in the new relations created by assemblage and hybridity, the conjunction of unexpected elements. Kathleen Graber's remarkable debut volume practices a poetic version of what surveyors call "triangulation"; by mapping points in the landscape and drawing lines between them, it's possible to identify where one stands, or at least to point toward what lies within the space identified by these lines of interchange. Thus Walter Benjamin, the copy shop and the reproductive clinic—or Joseph Cornell's boxes, a museum version of Marianne Moore's preserved living room, and freight boxes stacked by the tracks of New Jersey—become ways of locating a position from which to speak, to examine language's powers and failures, the inability of words to contain—or to remedy—desire. Correspondence is a fresh accomplishment, swift with feeling and intelligence, a restless critical mind mapping its way toward a means to bear the weight of love.
—Mark Doty
In these poems, it's the way in which correspondences slip and fail to correspond that generates the beauty and deeply felt intelligence of the whole: "I want it all. Every broken brick: / if not the fruit, the flower, if not this, the rind, whatever it is / that's left over." Here it is the struggle with incongruity that binds each assemblage together.
—Boston Review
Between Laurelton and Locust Manor
The houses turn from the tracks & play instead,
nose to nose with their identical neighbors,
the same old games:
who will blink first, guess what I’m hiding behind my back. How long
have they held the mower, the buried bone, the hubcap
in their yards? Someone’s saving seven busted up rowboats
a long way from the sea. Isn’t this art, this careful arrangement of what is
useless?
The way Painting without Mercy emerges
on broken plates. Even if there were water, a flood, nothing here
would float. Even from the train, we can tell a story
about the epiphanic suffering
of saints, even from here we can see the split
wood, the violent gray gash in the bow, give them names—Lucy,
Patron of Hide and Seek, Sophia, Martyr
of the Twenty Questions.
And this is where we stop, waiting
for the signal from the station. It’s a tired trope, a bright February.
I’ve lost something
I’ll never find. This is about black & white television,
about Ed Sullivan in earnest conversation with Topo Gigio,
acting as though he didn’t know there was a script,
a human hand inside. I don’t want to suggest
the assemblagist’s religion of junk because maybe
it’s simpler,
the explanation for what’s collecting
beyond the fence—
an ancient urge that rises up from the base of the skull & ferries us
to the harvest of whatever we can. But I spy a red rowboat on sawhorses
in the morning of every day. Somebody come tell me
that’s not a kind of faith.
Somebody say that’s not the kind of sign
we should expect from a god.
Kathleen Graber is currently a Hodder fellow at Princeton University. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has also been named the Amy Lowell Travel Fellow for 2008.
