Description

Kore Press, paperback

Publication Date: May 10, 2021

Publisher Marketing: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 responsibilitiesto one another, the earth, and the silences within ourselves.

Her debut collection, WAVE SAYS 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.