Bed of Impatiens: Poems
Description
Katie Hartsock's Bed of Impatiens is astir in myths and mythmaking in the backdrop of the grit, waters, scenes and atmospheres of the Midwest. While its tributes to Saint Augustine's Confessions are by turns meditative and daring, its travelogue of "Hotels, Motels, and Extended Stays" is quirky, irreverent and, yes, delightful. In Bed of Impatiens you can feel "the bliss/ and the burning too." Little wonder it is a finalist in the 2015 Able Muse Book Award.
PRAISE FOR BED OF IMPATIENS:
Has American poetry ever produced a fresher, savvier, grittier, more elegant, and drop-dead formally exhilarating sequence than Katie Hartsock's "Hotels, Motels, and Extended Stays"? If so, I've yet to see it. Hartsock is as deft (and loving) with the vulgarities of truck stop rent-by-the-hour as with the secret wit of rhyme, or the venerables of Homeric epic: her range and her inventiveness appear to know no limit. And this is just a fraction of what bursts to life in Bed of Impatiens. I'm dazzled by the sheer bounty of it.-Linda Gregerson
Like René Magritte I want to paint "This is not a first book" under this first book. It is Lolita all grown up and taking us on a cross-country tour of the motels she stayed in with Humbert. It's St. Augustine as Dennis Rodman, elbowing us out of position underneath God's basket. But it's not a cacophony of surrealism. Ms. Hartsock's classical training-her knowledge and powerful rhythms-is the ground, the spine of this book (pun intended); but the excitement is watching the ancient and the contemporary meet in an explosion of true Form.-James Cummins
Katie Hartsock's Bed of Impatiens characteristic vantage includes landscapes derelict and macabre, like the flooded grave in the first poem, and the endless highways of the US, with their extended-stay motels and the ghosts that inhabit them. Hartsock is a sharp and clever reader of the books of nature and of art, yet writes in nobody's shadow.-Mary Kinzie
What truth to find in a world whose rivers "we cannot swim in and no/ cannot drink the water/ cannot imagine that," a land of "seedless sweetness" and dank motels that are its monuments to transience? Katie Hartsock's answer in her ambitious first collection, Bed of Impatiens, is to wander and "let the weather in," to keep recalibrating her position in an ever-shifting poetic landscape.-Lee Sharkey
Katie Hartsock is attracted to "beauty in otherwise unlovely place." An often amused and goodhearted spirit sets the tone of some of Hartsock's poems, but the long historical and literary view of this poet also encompasses the tragic. Open to encounter, memory, feeling, avid for them, eloquent about them, these poems.-Reginald Gibbons (from the foreword)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Katie Hartsock was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and has lived in Cincinnati, Ann Arbor, and Chicago. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University. Recipient of the 2015 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, she is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Hotels, Motels, and Extended Stays and Veritas Caput. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, Southwest Review, RHINO, Measure, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Midwestern Gothic, among other journals, and in the anthology Down to the Dark River: Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015). She is an assistant professor of English at Oakland University (MI).
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Reviews
Carrie Shipers's magnificent endeavor aims to control the uncontrollable. In her splendid collection Cause for Concern she gives us her spirited poems-subversively satisfying in our era of cool wordplay. Both her comfort with ambiguity and her sassy candor aid the poet as she writes of a wife who is hoodwinked into a necessary patience-one she both chafes from and rebels against after her husband falls seriously ill. In rhythms that alternate between hope and defeat, the poems track the illness, but also punctuate the couple's changed world with quirky observations and a scrappy spirituality. (Not to mention a canine companion.) Her poet's craft, palpable in every arresting line, makes the subtlest turns of vulnerability with enviable poise.
-Molly Peacock, 2014 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper Garden
Only a poet of unquestionable bravery and technical acuity could rehearse the quotidian details of a middle class, middle aged existence with such exquisite, irresistible and terrifying honesty.
-Kwame Dawes, author of Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems
If illness is a country inhospitable to guests, then Carrie Shipers's second poetry collection, Cause for Concern, is our guidebook, preparing us for what we will find in the waiting room, by the bedside, in the bathroom, or on the skin when the gauze is lifted. These are naked, open poems. They say things that make us wince, as when we look at an incision still puckered and red. Shipers reminds us that our lives must first be prodded and cauterized, if the injured parts are ever to heal.
-Jehanne Dubrow, author of The Arranged Marriage
