Description
Poetry. WAVE SAYS is an impressionistic, eco-poetic collection inspired by the behavior of waves. With taut lyrics and pressurized white space, K.M. English's debut collection listens into the gaps, sensing into an experience of time, self, and world as perpetually shifting interactions "circuitries hot to touch... where the depths are believable."
Through impressionistic poetics in conversation with Dickinson, Celan, Woolf and Olson, as well as a more contemporary lineage of U.S. women experimental poets, WAVE SAYS enacts a theory of energies-in-presence by collapsing perceived borders between interior/exterior, past/present, and the living/dead and rendering a relational, distinctly feminist matrix of language, history, feeling, body, and space. The poet asks us to "stop insisting/ on surface" and shatters a field where "everything signals/ a shadow to what was."
From the floods in Katrina, to a child murdered by the shore, to waves of grief, salt water rising, and an Orca carrying her dead baby over 1,000 miles, WAVE SAYS explores ideas of what drowns us. By turns philosophical, political, and elegaic, this watery work focuses on the power of imagination and memory, on our collective complicity in violence and our responsibilities—to one another, the earth, and the silences within ourselves.
Author Bio
K.M. English is a daughter of Troy, NY, and holds degrees from Boston College and the City University of New York- Brooklyn College. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her debut collection, WAVE SAYS (Kore Press, 2021) has been a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, the Sawtooth Prize, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize, the Test Site Book Prize, and a semifinalist for the CSU Press First Book Prize. Her poetry is in Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Interim, Bone Bouquet, Third Coast, Matter, and Poetry Northwest. K.M. lives in Sacramento with her husband, two young sons and eleven fruit trees.
Author City: SACRAMENTO, CA USA