Description:
There is an absence at the heart of Katie Prince's debut collection, Tell This to the Universe, and an obsessive search to find what's missing. Like moons around faraway planets, the poems orbit the strange and brutal landscapes of longing, alienation, and grief as they move through physics to philosophy, linguistics to mathematics, fairy tales to science fiction. It could be said that this book is trying to find god-to name it, to hurt it or hold it, to make desperate demands of it-but it's just as true to say it's looking for a home, a family, an answer to a question it still doesn't know how to ask.
Review Quotes:
The poems in Tell This to the Universe, Katie Prince's arresting debut, navigate the failures of human language with paradoxical grace and beauty, revealing the power of words in the exploration of their limitations. They are sublime love letters to ephemerality and decay both vast and infinitesimal, to a reality in which we blink and our "bodies become cities/ become collections of bones and trash and buildings" a chaotic world moving, changing, and dying faster than our words can hope to capture it.
-Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Bone Map
Katie Prince is a poet who writes exquisitely and breathlessly about the cosmos, its presence in her experience and world of ice and loss. Prince is a fearlessly imaginative poet, a wielder of absurdist humor and heartbreaking lyricism, physics, and philosophical thought. At the heart, her poems contend with loss, and with how strange it is that we are here at all, the reality and unreality of it.
-Malena Mörling, author of Astoria