Disquieting new work from the winner of the 2001 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize.
Absence and trespass permeate these poems, in which what has just occurred--or what is about to--is as palpable and ominous as it is unrevealed. In Kate Northrop's finely-wrought verse, children have gone missing, sealed-off passages are discovered, and missing dogs emerge like visions before bounding off again. Northrop has a sixth sense for where the mundane and the uncanny pass too close for comfort--and no place more so than in the book's haunted centerpiece, a visceral rendering of a sixteenth-century Hungarian countess with certain insatiable appetites.
Gorgeous and strange, "Things Are Disappearing Here" is an imaginative tour-de-force.
Kate Northrop is the author of Back Through Interruption and Things Are Disappearing Here, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. She teaches at the University of Wyoming.