Description: Named after a workaday knife wielded by shepherds and farmers in the high pastures of the Alps when a tool for paring, shaping, cutting into, scraping out of, or freeing is useful, these poems likewise cleave away the false and deceptive to clarify and reveal a startling and unifying wonder. In language radiant, lovely, and disturbing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson explores the linkages between the uncomfortable familiar and the curiously intimate strange, making unexpected connections between phenomena. Arranged by association rather than chronology and connected by a sensual intelligence, this collection wanders from Maryland and India to Boston, France, New Hampshire and Irelandfrom Ezekiel's Flight and the Book of Kells, to the Tamil goddess Meenakshi.
Brief description: Rebecca Kaiser Gibson grew up in Maryland, lives in Marlborough, New Hampshire, and teaches poetry at Tufts University. In 2008, she received the Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A previous resident at the MacDowell Colony and The Heinrich Boll Cottage in Ireland, in 2011 she received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach poetry in Hyderabad, India. Her poems have been published in Agni, Antigonish, The Boston Phoenix, Field, The Greensboro Review, The Harvard Review, MARGIE, Mothering, Northwest Review, Pleiades, Salamander, Slate, The Adroit Journal, 236 Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Tupelo's 30/30 project, the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, reprinted in an anthology called Cadence of Hooves, and featured on Verse Daily. She has previously published two chapbooks--Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition.
Review Quotes: Thank you for your depth and these lyrical almost ethereal poems. There s a gentleness even though the images speak of violence. We love the images and the sound of your poems. The Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art"