Nowhere: Poems

by Katie Schmid

A book of wild imagination and linguistic play, Nowhere begins by chronicling the pain that the speaker and her absent father endure during the years they are separated while he is in prison. The alternative universe the speaker builds in order to survive this complex loss and its aftermath sees her experimenting with her body to try to build connection, giving it away to careless and indifferent lovers as she dreams of consuming them in the search for a coherent self. But can the speaker voice her trauma and disjunction? Can anyone, or is suffering something that cannot be said, but only hinted at? Ultimately the book argues that the barest hour of suffering can be the source of immense creative power and energy, which is the speaker’s highest form of consolation.

This brilliant debut collection offers cohesive trauma narratives and essential counter-narratives to addiction stories, and it consistently complicates the stories told by the world about so-called fatherless girls and the bodies of women.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 15, 2021

Reviews

[Ace Boggess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is everything I love about poetry: vulnerability, intensity, but most of all, a sense of connection to the strange--a way of experiencing the narrator's life as though one's own. Many of these poems deal with life with an incarcerated father, a unique perspective on something far too common in the U.S. Others touch on the heartbreak of miscarriage and loss, or the uncomfortable nature of many relationships. These pieces were compelling and tight, drawing me through the book as if reading a mystery where every page brings a new twist. This book gets my highest recommendation. It's a keeper and to be read more than once.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems were stunning! Beautiful language and fascinating images that gave me a lot to chew on as I read. Excellent stuff.

[Aunt Beast · Rating 5 out of 5]

“There is a complexity of feeling, consideration, and language in Katie Schmid’s Nowhere, a work that carries the weightiness of elegy and the defiant hopefulness of incantation as she writes the hard things: of the body, the painful legacy of family, and the dangerous force of desire. In ‘At the Bus Stop’ she captures with characteristic self-awareness and grace the spirit of her collection: ‘Here is the grief / at the heart of my language’ In poems of great technical mastery and vulnerability, Schmid’s Nowhere announces the arrival of a beautifully unsettling and sensual voice in American poetry.”—Kwame Dawes, author of Nebraska: Poems

“Honeyed, ambrosial, but with an underlying threat of decay, the poems in Nowhere are a tangle of grief and longing at the place where elegy meets aubade, where a girl ‘is trying to climb into another girl / through her mouth’ and a monster ‘hung his grief // like curtains in the air.’ . . . Morbidly funny, sexy, blistering, and vulnerable, Nowhere is a triumph, a wound that glistens in the dark.”—Emily Skaja, author of Brute: Poems

“Nowhere is the gut-punch, roller-coaster study of a psyche forged from absence and longing. I’d call it haunting, but that’s a bit too Vanity Fair for the gritty-pretty tones that temper Katie Schmid’s unflinching poems. Nowhere is actually haunted. Traces of the “ghost father’s” signature traits—recklessness, addiction, and magnetism—ensnare the speaker in turn, manifesting in swaggering revelations about self-sabotage, intimacy, and the nature of possession. Nowhere is a BIG mood. Katie Schmid is scary good.”—Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer

“Katie Schmid writes with crushing honesty—each narrative impulse fractured with the paradoxical urge of poetry: to contain what is impossible to contain, to say what is unsayable. Tracing the contours of the body, of masculinity and motherhood, Schmid’s poems reveal, one by one, each grief that gender makes of us, each loss desire demands we bring back into ourselves. And yet, the necessary beauty of longing shines through in each swallowing, in each insatiable and sorrowed line of this stunning collection.”—Stacey Waite, author of Butch Geography: Poems

[Josh Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, often disturbing, brutally honest collection of poems. I admire Schmid's bravery and skill. These poems seem to owe a debt to Sylvia Plath. They shock and awe like Plath. Schmid writes about subjects like her father, her sexuality, and the female body with a panicked, nightmarish voice that recalls Plath. Highly recommended.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the poetry of Katie Schmid!
My world is richer because of it.
I'm recommending this book to all my friends now.

[Celie · Rating 5 out of 5]

revelatory.