paper • 96 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-945588-21-1
Here are love poems for the 21st century, writing into meaning what before could only be felt.
The Arrangements explores love and desire as they relate to the boundaries of body, mind and language, and how these bonds and boundaries bleed into and maintain one another’s discreteness.
“Broad Night” from The Arrangements:
The only light is
all around—full
moon on each
ice-locked twig,
reflective mess
with brutal stars
in it. Love
is distance
its reaches
in your face
branching there.
Here chandelier
of dependent prisms,
what nimbus splits
into and joins it.
“…She asks the right questions, the ones rooted in nature and to which there is no answer.” – Paul Hoover
“…This is an electrifying collection, simultaneously wild and precise. It rearranged my mind into its best shape, eager to learn how to be part of the day and its world.” – Heather Christle
“With verve and purpose, Colby plays trick after alluring trick to write herself in and out of meaning.” – Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“…Kate Colby is a poet of great restraint, great elegance, and great attentiveness. These qualities all shimmer through her latest collection. Each poem is composed of the sparest couplets, which manage, even in their brevity and precision, to raise the most expansive questions of existence….” Read the full review.
“Counteractions, counterindications, and impossible interactions mark this meticulously crafted and sonically alluring seventh collection from Colby….” Read the full review.
“Colby is fresh and stirring—“Day doesn’t so much / progress as condense– // rain fills red Solo bowls / for feral cats in the yard”—yet her controlled language is fairly hypnotic, peacefully familiar: “There’s a first time / for everything and // now we’re in for it.” Read the full review.
“…If read quickly or independently of one another, one could mistake many of the poems in this collection for simple or playful lyric meditations, but Colby’s impeccable craft, as well as the pacing of the collection as a whole, allows these poems to build a world that asks readers to push themselves beyond the familiar ways of organizing their existence toward more uncomfortable and intangible interrogations of self….” Read the full review.