Catherine Kyle Knihy

From the Publisher: Kyle has crafted a world filled with magical realism, in a traditional and nontraditional sense. The lyrics in Flotsam are imbued with spells. She invokes the ocean, ships, and urban and rural villages to craft a modern fairy tale. This is a chapbook that explores unconscious and conscious desires. This chapbook explores the idea that “the line between flotsam and jetsam is want.” We learn that “humans distinguish the things waves do not.” By the end, Flotsam takes readers through the waters, across landscapes real and imagined to transform us until “we have become / the forest itself.”

Named for the glassy, mazelike structures that can form underground when lightning strikes sand, Fulgurite weaves together reality and myth. Informed by fairy tales, domestic fabulism, and environmental concerns, Catherine Kyle examines gender on large and small scales. Patriarchal influences in domestic spaces are compared to patriarchal influences on national and global levels, and identity is made complex by the fusion of survival, dissociation, and promise. The collection bears witness to the grief of the everyday while simultaneously pursuing hope.