Catherine Kyle

An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selves Honest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and nai¨ve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others. In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.

In her collection, Shelter in Place, Catherine Kyle offers unapologetic mirrors and terrifying prophecies; these graceful, imaginative poems are not afraid to look into the deep dark--within and without--into the places we often close our eyes against. Refusing retreat, spurning sanctuary, Kyle's poetry is interrogatory, seeking answers: if we advocate awareness as a "balm," especially now "in the age of the image," how can we stare into the faces of suffering and do nothing? She goes on to ask: "if this world is a story, / what is its moral," an answer that relies on our acceptance of responsibility as "the sovereign or the heir." Will we be parent or legacy, liberator or disciple? Kyle reminds us that although we often give in--make deals with crossroads demons, relinquish our "hands" for "gloves," the "softest kid skin," take the easy outs--through it all we have a choice; we can choose to be museums, to "make shelters of / our bodies," to "carry the ghosts / of what is lost." We can "become custom jobs," play our parts, save empathy, create change. Even as Kyle's poetry terrifies and punctures us with worry, it rebels, refusing to relinquish hope, goading us into bravery. Shelter in Place is a warning, a slap in the face, a kick in the ass, a pre-apocalyptic prayer, a guide to action where "agency" equals "lullaby elegy power." Kara Dorris, author of Night Ride Home and Untitled Film Still Museum

Catherine Kyle has crafted a poetic world filled with magical realism, in a traditional and non-traditional sense. The lyrics in Flotsam are imbued with spells. She invokes the ocean, ships, and urban and rural villages to craft a modern fairy tale. This is a chapbook that explores unconscious and conscious desires. Kyle expertly wields vivid imagery, lovely rhythms, textured verbs and taut metaphors. This chapbook explores the idea that "the line between flotsam and jetsam is want." We learn that "humans distinguish the things waves do not." By the end, Flotsam takes readers through the waters, across landscapes real and imagined to transform us until "we have become / the forest itself."