By Common Salt

by Killarney Clary

Killarney Clary's spare and lucid prose poems reduce the contemporary landscape to its essences and essentials, revealing the ways in which it is broken, unchartable, mysterious, and violent. Her language is unerring, her vision unique.

Genres: Poetry

82 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Harrison Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrative disrupted by the lyric, not the other way round, is something that happens in these incredible poems. You get the feeling they’re written in prose only because the line would be distracting rather than supportive. The pure sentence is what’s in command here.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a man who, through disease, feels each minute is his first. He says to his wife, "You are the first person I've seen. This is my first cup of coffee." I saw him on television; he was frustrated by his diary that recorded repeatedly, "I have just now woken up."