The Way Through

by Judith Kunst

Author Judith Kunst’s writing has been compared to the playground game of tetherball: words and ideas fling out to the outer edges of the known yet also stay anchored in the real. Poems in The Way Through take readers forward and backward in time; across geographies; across and around the works of Walt Whitman, Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Stroud, Simone Weil and others; and into the voiced perspectives of ink, paper, children, and a multitude of strangers and friends—all with a steadiness of purpose and a clarity of vision we can trust.

A first collection published later in life, The Way Through earns its experiments with form and its honed assertions about marriage, parenthood, friendship, suffering, art, faith, and more. The book sets up house in the borderlands between the concrete and the ineffable, the given life and the longed-for release or arrival, and that house is a comfortable one: well appointed, sturdy in turbulent weather, and always open for guests.

“Touch your life,” Kunst urges, “And come away from nothing you have touched / unchanged.” Such change in these poems may be as small as two curved marks added to the word “(In) Sufficient” or as big as a paralyzed friend’s decision to laugh again, but with every poem Kunst tests and affirms Weil’s declaration that “This world is a closed door, and at the same time it is the way through.”

72 pages, Paperback

Published June 19, 2020

Reviews

[Jessica Kantrowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is spectacular poetry — both each poem individually and how they play with each other and build on each other’s stories. Just wonderfully written and structured. I don’t usually read a book of poems in one day, but this seemed to call for it, and I’m glad I did. I will definitely be rereading this many times.

[Jean Brennan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book the way my family ate Thanksgiving dinner: gorge on it in one sitting, then keep going back for more. The poems are arranged with great intention and interconnection, each one building on those that came before. Images and references repeat throughout, a chronology of the author's adulthood told from non-traditional touchstones; her husband and children are shadowy reference points in the background of the tales of transformation and pain of strangers and friends. Throughout are direct references to other well- and lesser-known writers and artists, whetting the appetite for more exploration of the greater creative world. This book joins the small collection of books such as Leaves of Grass and Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems that I keep close at hand to revisit when I need to remember who I really am.