HOW LATE DESIRE LOOKS,
winner of the Peregrine Smith Prize in Poetry
"Many of the rich, inquisitive poems of Katrina Roberts' first collection, How Late Desire Looks, recall the tradition of late nineteenth -century decadence more than the spare, postmodern aesthetic of much recent poetry...[...] Roberts' real talent is her attention to those small moments that would, in more conventional works, remain asides. Her ability to 'look in every drop which clings/To each blade and thorny stem or bitter lemon/To see reflected there entire worlds of possibility," makes for her free-wheeling, associative digressions...[...] Roberts carries off such an impulsive rush of transition through the bare energy she presses into vivid language. Even those poems she pares down into fragments boast unusual detail: an avocado's 'reptilian hide, peeled away, ' curtails the abstract tendencies of the prose poem 'The Space'; a 'pavonine mosaic' of sea glass prevents another poem from veering toward translucence. Her ability to blend almost pre-Raphaelite decription with a philosophical impulse reminiscent of Heidegger and Francis Ponge reaches its height in what could be called a group of 'object' poems. As if prepared to quell such tame, readerly expectations, the first line of 'The Pin' cautions, 'Let it not be said that the pin is a small thing. Already it has made you stop to listen.'" --Genevieve Abravanel, Harvard Review |
How Late Desire Looks"No spare, modest lyrics here; Katrina Roberts's coloratura debut is a fully orchestrated, full-throated performance -- bold, inclusive, and sure. Discarding Modernist principles of economy, Roberts puts everything in, ransacking the dictionaries, the etymologies, the storehouses of formal variation. The result is a big, fresh poetry, smart and painterly and passionate, which brings new attention to old verities: the surprise and ache of desire, the struggle for tenderness, the longings of 'this body I want to still in its steady falling.'"
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