Bob Hicok
“Correspondence is a book which honors its epigraphs. Quoting Walter Benjamin, Kathleen Graber makes clear that she "takes up the struggle against dispersion." This is a poetry of meditative embrace, which both repairs and celebrates the often chaotic nature of life. Her long lines and slow cadences lend a devotional feel to poems in which the hidden and forgotten are returned to the lyric realm of consciousness. She would hold everything and clarify everything she holds. There is a mending quality to Graber's imagination, a mending of self by extension into the world. This is a wonderful book.”
Mark Doty
“The tool of the genius in the twentieth century, Donald Barthelme once wrote, is rubber cement. Our modes of juxtaposition may be electronic and instantaneous, but the principle's dead-on: meaning arises, in this hour, in the new relations created by assemblage and hybridity, the conjunction of unexpected elements. Kathleen Graber's remarkable debut volume practices a poetic version of what surveyors call "triangulation"; by mapping points in the landscape and drawing lines between them, it's possible to identify where one stands, or at least to point toward what lies within the space identified by these lines of interchange. Thus Walter Benjamin, the copy shop and the reproductive clinic—or Joseph Cornell's boxes, a museum version of Marianne Moore's preserved living room, and freight boxes stacked by the tracks of New Jersey—become ways of locating a position from which to speak, to examine language's powers and failures, the inability of words to contain—or to remedy—desire. Correspondence is a fresh accomplishment, swift with feeling and intelligence, a restless critical mind mapping its way toward a means to bear the weight of love.”
