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Pretend the World confronts our false sense of safety in our self-created worlds. From her St. Paul kitchen to the historical shores of Lake Superior, from an airplane above Bagdad to a clothing factory in Guangdong, Kathryn Kysar pretends the glimmering and the sordid in these honest, searing poems that explore the inequities, cracks, and fissures in women's constructed lives.
Kathryn Kysar is the author of Dark Lake (Loonfeather Press, 2002), a book of poetry, and is the editor of Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers (Borealis Books, 2008). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Anderson Center, and she has published poems in many anthologies and magazines, including Great River Review, Mizna, and Painted Bride Quarterly. She serves on the board of directors for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.
"In poems that 'tick from her tongue,' Kathyrn Kysar skillfully weaves the personal with the political. I'm thinking of pieces like 'Cutting Bread' and 'Playing with Planes,' but also 'the weight of war in a mother's heart.' This is a sure lyric voice rooted in the Midwest, but also the world at large. In language both precise and vivid ('Exactness is [her] prayer'), we experience 'soft, tendril-like bones' and watch as '[c]rimson curls a leaf's edge.' Pretend the World brings to mind, but with a twist, the Whitmanic ethos: who touches this book, touches a woman."—Francisco Aragón, author of Glow of Our Sweat
"In Kathryn Kysar's poems, culture and history become an umbilical cord burrowed deep into Midwestern soil, spiraling and reemerging, literally, in China. These are poems that merge landscape and interiority to re-inspire life. What results is a voice strong and delicate as a nexus of white tree branches mid-winter, emanating poem after gorgeous poem that in total whisper like wind over land and water the constant reminder: 'we are all learning to leave.' Profound, wise, playful, Kysar is a rare and amazing poet. A beautiful, awesome book of graces to be wildly celebrated."—Ed Bok Lee, author of Real Karaoke People and Whorled
"Balancing the delicate acts of loving and grieving, Kathryn Kysar microscopes the world of modern woman/motherhood. Kysar's ability to politicize parenting and gender offer a gripping but blunt way of seeing the lives we create, the wars we wage, the things we consume, and the connections we make without overbearing sentimentality or righteousness. Pretend the World is a searing testament to being a mother in a world filled with monsters."—Poetry Foundation
Table of Contents:
1/
Last October
The Ghost Husband
Cutting Bread
The Hideaway
Salvation
Dream Poem
Inspected by Number 5
Farm House Girl
Ada Asleep
The Fruit
2/
Mackinac Island: Spring Melt
Returning to Lake Superior
Early Spring
Berries, Venison, and Ice
The Day Ten People Died at Red Lake
Under the Plastic Tarp
The Burden
Holding Her
The Effects of Rock and Roll on an Unborn Fetus
Bones
3/
Faultlines
Flying East
I Sit Still in Church with a Pencil
Golden Numbers
Playing with Planes
Diary of a First Grader
German
Things I Learned from my Grandmother
Stolen Groceries
Eating Sushi with Robert Bly and Sam Hamill
Japanese Garden
At Sunset
4/
The Storm
Reverend Tennyson Comes to Call
Last Night's Dream: Another Love Poem
Adrift
Chinook Montana 1992
First Kiss
Train Stop
Frederica, The Aging Flamenco Dancer, Arrives at the Eastern European
Resort
Love Poem
Little Witches
Frankie in the Attic
The Falls of St. Anthony: A Short History
At the Anderson Center