Complex and exultant poems of exquisite pain and conciliation by one of Brooklyn’s most devoted and dynamic poets.


Often breathtaking ... this latest collection from Kocot intersperses frantic images with hauntingly simple and loss-laden outcries. Throughout, there is the poet's thwarted longing for an understanding that cannot come: "all poets and poetry elude me,/ especially myself and my own"; Kocot's speaker--a voice simultaneously adorable, helpless and deeply brave--is both obsessed with and frustrated by process: "See, in a poem, things actually/ have to be doing things,/ not just floating around." ... Kocot's most lucid moments achieve a kind of visionary clarity ("The waters are very simple today./ Hospital blue, in error of twilight"), a beautiful refusal to accept the inevitable ("Listen, I said it before, die/ and come back as fire") and inklings of the kind of loss that could yield such a powerful, almost overflowing book: "I wait to go to you,/ smoking and breaking curses under/ the Jackson Pollock fuck you moon." --Publishers Weekly


Noelle Kocot is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006), and she is the recipient of numerous awards. She lives and teaches in Brooklyn.