The Fact of the Matter

“Through contemporary voices and timeless contexts, these haunting poems fracture—then rebuild—lyric expectations. At times drawing from science and art, epic and elegy, The Fact of the Matter transcends, finally, description’s easy borders. Its achievement is singular and stunning—and places Sally Keith at the forefront of younger American poets.”

“In these poems ‘stuck on the intricate work,’ Sally Keith proves herself not only among this generation’s most vital poets, she reveals herself as a profound thinker of art’s complicated relation to the people and events that fill it. The Fact of the Matter speaks lovingly of love’s complications—love as a force that depends on fault—and gives to its readers one of the few actual blessings I know: poems unsparing in their care.”

“At their best, these acrobatic movements from one fact or phrase to a disparate other are not whimsical non sequiturs but revelations bridging history and the inner life. For Sally Keith, discoveries in any discipline—from physics to painting—push humanity forward, and myth is used not as a crutch for meaning, but as an anchor for new discourse on selfhood in our moment.”

“Force, says Simone Weil, turns humans to things; but beauty is also a force, and both forms are here turned from their inexorable forward movement toward the making of the artist, who transforms their energy into pictures and sounds so crystalline and still we can apprehend the place motion itself begins.”

“These poems are the still moments between actions; time slowed to its instants, then silently reassembled, so that a thousand years ago is yesterday. Achilles removes his helmet in the next room while Dürer prepares a pigment. These are the unheard whispers of the Odyssey, the hidden corners of the master’s studio. Poems and Paintings and History and Love and the space one leaves them for. Herein is purest magic.”