Window at Sunset
On the street and lying
in snow is an owl not yet fully white
with no apparent mangling, just dead,
as if reminded of something more pressing
and now stiff. I kick it over.
Out our window there is nothing
but water nothing but paper
nothing but sky and then only
nothing but sky until my mind
sharp and curved as a raven
dives back to the earth.
These fragile wings.
Knots of wind, sudden sheer
panes in our path.
The window is now more fully blue,
the balance has shifted
I notice and it is now
the interior
that casts the greater light.
-from Hollow Out
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Out and About
I've been invited to read at Minnesota State University as part of the McGrath Visiting Writer's Series:
April 23, 2009
4:00 Talk on the Writer's Craft
8:00 Reading
For more info on the reading and the series, click here for a link to McGrath Series PDF files.
April 23, 2009
4:00 Talk on the Writer's Craft
8:00 Reading
For more info on the reading and the series, click here for a link to McGrath Series PDF files.
Friday, January 23, 2009
This Just Out:
I'm honored to announce that Hollow Out has been nominated by New Rivers Press for the Griffin Trust Award For Excellence in Poetry and a 2009 PEN Literary Award.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Advance praise for Hollow Out
"No one since John Haines' Winter News has written so well about the interminable winters, the snow, the cold, and the human solitude of those living in polar regions. These are the dark night of the soul of poems beautifully written, supremely intelligent and consistently rewarding. Kelsea Habecker's poems remind us that the outer and inner landscapes are connected and that the way we think about the world depends on the amount of light and darkness we are given each day. Hollow Out is one of the most moving and original books of poems I have read in years."
-Charles Simic, Poet Laureate of the United States, author of My Noiseless Entourage
"The lyric voice in Kelsea Habecker's Hollow Out is almost hypnotically lovely. Her poems are so cleanly written! They are also grave, soulful, and infinitely tender. Other hallmarks include their passionate restraint, beacon-like humility, great delicacy of expression, and spirit of endurance--this last despite the arctic darkness many of them so beautifully reveal, but never succumb to."
-Amy Gerstler, author of Ghost Girl and Bitter Angel
"Hollow Out is full of precision, of climate adding its persona to thinking and feeling, the marvelous results of the natural, inner-versus-outer struggles we take for granted the moment we forget that we are bodies and that our bodies are the property of language, surrender, and earth. The style within Habecker's craft accomplishes "a temporary stay" so that the poems never feel over poeticized, or forced into stanzas-with-training wheels. When things happen, they happen because the lyric impulse has interrupted experience, not because the work must serve metaphor or force the reader into literary understanding. These poems are full of creative integrity: minimal, structural, purposely accidental, and the fluidity of the vertebrated body behaving like the tongued mouth casting a compassed spell."
-Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of The Maverick Room and The Good Junk (Take Three #1)
-Charles Simic, Poet Laureate of the United States, author of My Noiseless Entourage
"The lyric voice in Kelsea Habecker's Hollow Out is almost hypnotically lovely. Her poems are so cleanly written! They are also grave, soulful, and infinitely tender. Other hallmarks include their passionate restraint, beacon-like humility, great delicacy of expression, and spirit of endurance--this last despite the arctic darkness many of them so beautifully reveal, but never succumb to."
-Amy Gerstler, author of Ghost Girl and Bitter Angel
"Hollow Out is full of precision, of climate adding its persona to thinking and feeling, the marvelous results of the natural, inner-versus-outer struggles we take for granted the moment we forget that we are bodies and that our bodies are the property of language, surrender, and earth. The style within Habecker's craft accomplishes "a temporary stay" so that the poems never feel over poeticized, or forced into stanzas-with-training wheels. When things happen, they happen because the lyric impulse has interrupted experience, not because the work must serve metaphor or force the reader into literary understanding. These poems are full of creative integrity: minimal, structural, purposely accidental, and the fluidity of the vertebrated body behaving like the tongued mouth casting a compassed spell."
-Thomas Sayers Ellis, author of The Maverick Room and The Good Junk (Take Three #1)
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