Description: A meditation on the centrality of predation to the Western lyric tradition.
In dialogue with Wittgenstein's "On Certainty," Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt," among other works, Kristen Case's poems and lyric essays unearth the ways violence both disrupts and enables our ways of knowing--or approximating knowledge of--one another.Brief description: Kristen Case lives in Maine. She is the author of the poetry collections Little Arias and Principles of Economics. She won the Maine Literary Award in Poetry for both collections. She is also the author of scholarly essays and books on American literature, most recently Keeping Time: Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar.
Review Quotes: "Illuminated by a daring and brilliant "alphabetical light," Daphne by Kristen Case reveals "tree-life" as a "shivering and light-saturated language," one where "possibilities of leaf-light are layered into a picture of infinity." Dazzlingly erudite and intimately lyrical, Case's poems embody a philosophy of desire within the embrace of the human imagination, one where the poet reconfigures trauma and memory. Daphne also explores the artistic realm of ekphrasis in an astute reading of Bernini's statue of Daphne and Apollo while engaging in thoughtful dialogue with sister poems like "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by Keats: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Offering notes on classical aesthetics interwoven with gorgeous seaweed wrack "inking" the Maine coast, this tree-lined book of laurels offers the radiant, mythological transformations of our daily lives: "In the moment love is consumed by its machinery, personhood slips out and seals itself in wood.""-- "Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Beautiful Immunity and Phyla of Joy"