Packing Light: New & Selected Poems

by Marilyn Kallet

Multiple-award winning poet Marilyn Kallets first book of new and collected poems draws from many of her books and publications to create a succinct and comprehensive overview of her work. Author of 14 books, her poems have been published in hundreds of periodicals and poetry reviews over the last thirty years.

Genres: Poetry

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 25, 2009

About the author

Marilyn Kallet served two terms as Knoxville Poet Laureate, June 27, 2018-June 2020. Even When We Sleep is her 19th book publication. Other poetry volumes include How Our Bodies Learned, The Love That Moves Me and Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press. She translated Paul Eluard’s Last Love Poems and Benjamin Péret’s The Big Game. Kallet is Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee. Since 2009, she has mentored poetry groups for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in Auvillar, France; this group will resume in Spring, 2022. Kallet’s poems have appeared in Plume, New Letters, Potomac Review and American Diversity Report, among others.

Contact: mkallet@utk.edu
Website: http://marilynkallet.com

Reviews

[Stacie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this local poet for a fabulous in-person session of Poetry with Pat in Knoxville Tennessee! Kallet’s book is read backwards through time, with the more recent poems,deeper and more complex, at the surface, becoming lighter in texture and tone as one uncovers the early poems. Some favorites:
Packing Light
With Dignity
Ode to what cannot be praised
Hooked
Even This
Fig Bread
No makeup
The Hedgehog 🦔
It Can’t Happen
Horb
To my poem of hope
Lovers
Passover

[Jen Knox · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best writing: poetry, fiction and nonfiction, invites transcendence. There is a personalization that occurs for the reader, that allows the authors' insights to superimpose the readers' life experiences, which allows a sort of partnership in art. Marilyn Kallet's beautiful book accomplishes this, and better, it does so with astute humor. I am savoring this book, not wanting it to end; then again, the great thing about poetry such as Kallet's is that it contains more than this reader is able to see--somehow, I know this. I will return to these poems again and again.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A voice that becomes deeper, clearer, and stronger, evolving from the shallower Early Poems through the worldly explorations of the middle years to the profoundly personal rumination of Criminal Art and the sarcastic speculation on the nature of the cosmos (Dear Swallowed)—a collection encompassing six decades of a life well lived, observed, and inscribed.

Favorite Poems:
“Packing Light”
“Is There Lightning on Venus?”
“At Bikernieki”
“The Hedgehog”
“The Hit”
“To My Poem of Hope”
“Bad Sex”
“The Genius Test, First Grade”
“Before the Discovery of the Mind”

[Ker]

For poetry readers interested in a smart and spunky feminist female voice.

Full disclosure: I designed this book.

[THE TORONTO QUARTERLY]

TTQ's Poem of the Week - Bad Sex

http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.c...

[Linda Garfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and felt poetry that touches deep places that made me laugh, cry and marvel at her talent!