Desiring Map

by Megan Kaminski

Poetry. "The body 'being' in sun, the gaze at rain, teleology inside the house—with these strokes and compasses, Megan Kaminski deftly configures a desiring map, across seacoasts and Kansas plains, through leaves, roots, movements of light. Here a quieter but not quietist America emerges where life's precarity holds—there is a relation between the natural world and neural capacity—as we are pulled into syntax's own search and quizzicality, its seeking to find a place for the I that only momentarily settles before it dislodges again, uncovering questions, finding parts of speech or weeds that answer. 'Speech lies in the break on the river edge,' the poem 'subtle splendor.'"—Erin Mouré

"Megan Kaminski's book is hauntingly quiet, but not silent, just as 'teleology is not silent.' The book is in some ways the teleology of imagism, realizing itself late in history and bursting into jagged pieces, having been dragged through 'some saffron metropolis' and the long summer of the great plains. It is a book that approaches us cannily, drenched in form, never word-spent and never without cocktails; a 21st century pleasure with a keen eye on the terrain and something to say."—Joshua Clover

"One of the best books I've read this year, Megan Kaminski's DESIRING MAP melds landscape to mind-to heart-to breath-with some of the most subtly effective melopoeia I've ever encountered in any book of poems. Use it as a dowsing rod, as I've been doing, to find the brain's poetic reuptake pump, and to get it moving again."—Joseph Massey

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2012

About the author

Megan Kaminski is the author of two books of poetry, Deep City (Noemi Press, 2015) and Desiring Map (Coconut Books, 2012), and nine chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Third Coast, and other journals. Before joining the faculty at the University of Kansas, she made her home in Los Angeles, Paris, and Portland, OR. She is an assistant professor in the University of Kansas' Graduate Creative Writing Program and the 2015-2016 Hall Center for the Humanities Creative Fellow. She also curates the Taproom Poetry Series in downtown Lawrence.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Desiring Map by Megan Kaminski:

My syntax shift

My presence on the winter boat contradicted
all prescience on the matter of drowning
far into the Atlantic. Further west near the Hudson,
autumnal blankets whisper over mountains
and through resurrectionless forests. Imagine flying from
boats to biplanes, sprinkling dust and dawn along
the way. The undoing of summer made my syntax shift
and examine your listing out center the bay. Somewhere along the journey,
your boat drifted away, off to a triangle or under a bridge.
Its casing stressed beyond regulation, and its seaworthiness
questionable, at the very least. In damask-lined parlors
I marvel at the congenital daybreak, compute
ratio of wave to tree.

[giuseppe manley · Rating 4 out of 5]

particularly liked the second half, eager to see what she might come out with next

[Matthew Porubsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic collection of journeys. The section 'carry catastrophe' is remarkable.