The Alphabet Not Unlike the World

“Katrina Vandenberg recognizes the alphabet as a site where the global and the local join, where history becomes the present moment, where history has moment, is momentous. These poems live near enough to ‘the house of the unsaid’ that when in one of them the first person invites the second to ‘tell me if you want me to stop,’ a reader may say, as I did out loud, Not yet. Please, not yet.”

“I had meant to read a few poems, then return to the book another time. Two hours later I put it down, shaken and exhilarated. It careens between heartbreak and breakthrough in ways that began by amazing me and finished by moving me to the point where I had no choice but to agree when Katrina Vandenberg writes in the book’s last poem, ‘You can’t, in the end / close the book.’”

“Both emotionally resonant and intellectually ambitious … Katrina Vandenberg [shows] remarkable restraint when telling stories. She trusts her reader enough to leave these spare images uncluttered with explanation. More important, her reader can trust that fine writing and poetic logic will carry these poems as they travel across the wide spaces between what we understand.”

“A stranger pays your bar tab out of pity; the inmate—seeking approval—changes his tune year after year; a saint stands still enough for birds to nest in his hand: these poems take us to the profane, to shed light on the tenuous sacred. Katrina Vandenberg’s prosodic gift takes us to the breezy edge of the line. In traditional forms like the ghazal, witty alphabet poems, and cyclonic, free verse, she reminds us that truth already is slant.”