Kathryn Kirkpatrick
“What does it mean to be a person in relation to others, both human and
Natalie Eleanor Patterson, Editor’s Choice Award
animal? Rife with observations of the natural and manmade worlds,
Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick is a garden of awareness and grief,
insistence and wonder. In this full-length collection, Kirkpatrick blends
a clarity of artistic vision with a close attention to form, metaphor,
and the nuances of language. These are poems rooted in landscape
and memory, about mothers and daughters, love and mourning, and
the harrowing context in which we now find ourselves. Creature offers
a poetry of paying attention and of being in the world, ultimately
revealing that what is most human about us is what is most creaturely,
and how we are all ultimately “tossed in the vastness.”
Creature
Too small by far, the vet’s nurse said, too young
to live apart from the mother chipmunk,
squirrel, or mouse who mislaid you days old
just past our bottom step but near the cat,
the car, our own large feet.
Too few survive,
the website warned, untutored human care.
Too much to monitor and finally fail
to master—bowels, body heat, feedings.
But I tried anyway. To save your wild,
tenacious life, your minute spread of toes,
curled you in cotton at my blank chest—
my heat your heat as drop by drop your blind
and eager taking in of what I offered
is what I now remember of you best.