Kate Northrop’s first collection, Back Through Interruption (Kent State University Press, 2002), won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Award. Her second collection, Things Are Disappearing Here (Persea Books, 2007), was the finalist for the James Laughlin Award and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her most recent collection, Clean, was published by Persea Books in 2011.
He comes leaping out of the closed door of my dreams– a dark retriever, slick as if he had just swum quickly across a river and his name tags glitter though nothing is written on them. In the center of the living room he sits and he persists as flowers persist: a vase of the […]
The skirt flaps in our garden, that worn cotton upon which roses were printed long ago yet having faded, further back than background, are they not more real than the remembered ones, those opening summers in the hedgerow?– And still, however pale, visible unlike your mother living in the house years ago, years even before […]
Now it’s their daughter laughing with a boy who calls from the window something precise and obscene to the two men crossing the empty park, carrying large instruments in dark cases. Snow hangs over the city, over the afternoon and when one man stops, shifting his weight, the other looks at the sky. Then they […]
Listen, everyone in a room wants a division, a crack at a girl. Just keep one eye out; don’t lean toward windows, don’t drink greedily like that. And when you pass through a room, smile directly, at someone even if they seem to be engaged in conversation–tell me, who’s completely engaged?– and the transaction shall […]
You in the door look back and are no longer there, although that is the hall through which you walked a hundred times thinking well, what of it? –awake in the middle of the night– and that is the window where the sky drew back and night came on, where the planes banked in scheduled […]
The house is empty and girls go in. They drift through hours in the summer. Across the river, music begins: Love, it’s summer. The closed homes open. The docks are decked with lights. But further the house is empty and girls go in to light their lovely cigarettes; they listen closely to the woods. Leaves? […]
Things are disappearing here: a pale light spreads over the sea beneath which X drops, falls back to the blind silences, to the undeveloped secret fish which have been abandoned there and grow vicious. And things are disappearing also in the country. Already the roads twist into the distance, rise into columns of smoke and […]