In the Ice House
Genevieve Kaplan's In the ice house offers an innovative meditation on domestic life and the physical world that surrounds it, chronicling "at least the beginnings of some disaster" taking place in a landscape that "had no symmetry." Deftly channeling poets like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, as well as invoking Kaplan's own distinct poetic sensibility, these poems reveal an atmospheric and wondrous world filled with odd and compelling images. Readers confront the menace of the ordinary, "the whale-faced spout of the drainpipe, the cluck / of the chicken-bird" and how "the light attacks / the window and the stress of the shining / does not ease." The poet's insistent evocation of elemental images--the birds, the ice, the water--becomes almost incantatory, as the speaker seeks escape from "the frantic outside" she's trapped within. Kaplan's sky "has the depth / of an ocean," and this book deeply articulates how "silence is the only word that can replace loss." Moving artfully between internal desires and incisive observations of the external, these stunning poems radiate with both heat and ice.
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Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Genevieve Kaplan is a graduate of UC Santa Cruz and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently lives in Southern California where she is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. Her poems often reflect on domestic scenes, as well as look outward to consider the natural world of California with a discerning eye, while her critical work builds on her experience with book arts and visual media, examining the state of the book through its production and presentation, with attention toward how this relates to trends in contemporary poetry.
The founding editor of the Toad Press International Chapbook Series, which publishes literary translations, she's also working on Gold Line Press, a perfect-bound chapbook series, with her fellow graduate students at USC, and was co-editor of an anthology, The Loudest Voice: Volume 1. Her poems and essays have been published in numerous journals, including Jubilat, Gulf Coast, Jacket, Copper Nickel, Fence, and Northwest Review. Winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation's To the Lighthouse Publication Prize, In the ice house is her first book of poetry.
"The precise, crystalline lyrics of Genevieve Kaplan's In the ice house reveal that wonder exists everywhere in the habits and habitations of domestic space. There is no beauty so small, so vernacular that it escapes the illumined attention of this gifted poet. These are poems to read the world by."
--Peter Gizzi
"We find ourselves wandering deep, deep into the world in this collection of sharp, startling poems--¬poems that often have a swerve at the end, sending us to the unexpected. The birds return, and the trees, and the ice, always the ice, but each time, new piercing details come into view. Though spare on the page, these pieces radiate a wealth born of Genevieve Kaplan's unique and invaluable view of the world."
--Cole Swenson
