bathe in it or sleep
poems by
Kim TriedmanISBN 13: 978-1-59948-156-2
~40 pages, $10
* * * WINNER OF THE 2008 MSR CHAPBOOK CONTEST * * *
About the Author / Comments / Sample
Kim Triedman began writing poetry after working in fiction for several years. In the past year, she’s been named finalist for the 2007 Philbrick Poetry Award, finalist for the 2008 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, semi-finalist for the 2008 Black River Chapbook Competition and winner of the 2008 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition. Her poems have been published widely in literary journals and anthologies here and abroad. She is a graduate of Brown University and lives in the Boston area with her husband and three daughters. This is her first collection.
In this beautiful and accomplished first collection, Kim Triedman writes movingly of being a child, a mother, a lover, a daughter, but most of all of being a person with a body in a world of intense experiences, experienced in the body and in the intensity of language itself. These are stunning and often breathtaking poems. I can’t wait to read more!
—Nadia Herman Colburn
Nature is a shaping presence in Kim Triedman’s poems of self and family—poems with the tensile strength and delicacy of a spider web. The season at the heart of them is winter: chill-choked;/ knife-blue sky sharpening/ its edge against/ the iron of the earth. Even indoors, the air is bright, etched, elemental. These revelatory poems discover beauty in the roughest terrain of love, of loss, of change—guided by the speaker’s quiet, yet insistent voice of the color of/ flame.
—Cammy Thomas
Choke-Hold
but winter:
howling,
chill-choked;
knife-blue sky sharpening
its edge against
the iron of the earth.
Every day an accusation,
even the trees:
branches like bones
pointing,
pewter shards of ice.
It’s a lot ofwork, this breathing
and breathing:
wind-wheezed;
eyes seamed against
the steel; red hands
weeping white. Air isless than air. Even
the cypresses
gasping,
drained of color; more
black than green.
Think of it this way:
Between the past and the future
stands a house. It’s tidy
and white, nearly readyto explode. The terror, you see, the
weight of such a thing:
neither here nor there, like words,withheld, or the hand
that meant to stroke.
Even in a strong wind leavescan double-back, and
seagulls hang, frozen in sky.
We sit,burning in silence:
eyes forward—
remembering nothing.
Once Removed
your mind a bluish thing, twilit.
I have felt it, many times:
the squint of eyes, abstraction of hands,
the light of late afternoonladdering its way through
broken clouds; even the cormorants,
blacker than oil, hanging their wings
out to dry. The way youfollow a thought like a tune,
half-listening-half-dreaming, in and out
of time, plumbing its bluish depths.
Never mind: I am not meantto understand. The rocks are
black, the seaweed roils like
tangled dreadlocks in the foam;
the tonguing of the waves. Your facea blank.