ANC049: Parallel by Catherine Kyle

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In this world an army is seeking / the demon. The demon is seeking // you. You and I crouch in the wicker / womb of a scarlet hot air balloon’s // basket. We avert our eyes. We do not  / touch. We are lucky to have this time. // Heat, string, and scraps of cloth are all / that preserve us from falling to fangs. // From being pincushioned by arrows. / The beast is a mountain: gray and titanic. // The army howls for blood. They will / not discern between its death and yours.

"A poet may write in order to change the world but it takes a poet of exceptional confidence to change the world in order to write. In the way we examine ourselves in a mirror, Catherine Kyle’s Parallel examines the self through mirrored realities. 'I wanted to know the realms / in me,' she writes. T.S. Eliot may have famously dared to disturb the universe, but Kyle has no qualms about creating new ones repeatedly. Kyle offers ode after ode to alternate universes, apocalyptic places where the speaker prays for 'monster skin in which to fight / monsters.' By allowing herself infinite identities (from succubus to mother to thief), Kyle unravels her own anger, desires, and experiences. Deeply imaginative, darkly revelatory . . ." 
—Michael Schmeltzer, author of Blood Song and Elegy/Elk River 

". . . presented in clean couplets and pristine prose, these poems only look orderly from the outside. As the reader enters the 'illuminated world' that Kyle has constructed, they will discover the most provocative epistemological and metaphysical disruptions. Here, familiar forms exist in friction with an inherently unstable world she herself has revealed, one that resides just below the surface of events. Indeed, Kyle has a marvelous gift for tension, those sparks that light our way through the city where nothing is certain. This book is 'something with [an] unfixed trajectory,' populated with many alternate yet simultaneous paths . . .” —Kristina Marie Darling, author of Dark Horse and The Disappointment Acts 

". . . live for awhile in a parallel universe where the devil eats your eyes and the end of the world makes planes drop from the sky like diamonds. These poems bring together rage and paper dolls, out of order oracles and concrete bassinets, dandelion seeds and succubi. Kyle is a poet of a universe that adjusts, disfigures, corrects, and consoles the bright void of this world, a parallel in which every red dress is lit with blood or drenched in flame." —Traci Brimhall, author of Rookery and Our Lady of the Ruins

60 pages, handmade and numbered
$16 (US postage paid)