Description: Winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition
With Radial Symmetry, Katherine Larson has created a transcendent body of poems that flourish in the liminal spaces that separate scientific inquiry from empathic knowledge, astute observation from sublime witness. Larson's inventive lyrics lead the reader through vertiginous landscapes--geographical, phenomenological, psychological--while always remaining attendant to the speaker's own fragile, creaturely self. An experienced research scientist and field ecologist, Larson dazzles with these sensuous and sophisticated poems, grappling with the powers of poetic imagination as well as the frightful realization of the human capacity for ecological destruction. The result is a profoundly moving collection: eloquent in its lament and celebration. from "Metamorphosis" We dredge the stream with soup strainersand separate dragonfly and damselfly nymphs-
their eyes like inky bulbs, jaws snapping
at the light as if the world was full of
tiny traps, each hairpin mechanism
tripped for transformation. Such a ricochet
of appetites insisting life, life, life against
the watery dark, the tuberous reeds.
Review Quotes: "Bracingly artful. . . . Radial Symmetry marks the arrival of a poet whose work merits many readings."--Alison Hawthorne Deming, Orion
Winner of the 2012 Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University Winner of the Gold Award for Poetry, Foreword Indies Book of the Year, 2011 Winner of the 2012 Kate Tufts Discovery Award given by Claremont Graduate University