Drift

About Mary Kinzie

Mary Kinzie is the author of six previous collections of poetry. Her earlier volumes include Drift, Autumn Eros, and Summers of Vietnam. She is the literary executor of American poet Louise Bogan and the author of A Poet’s Guide to Poetry.

Praise

“Each statement becomes a kind of victory . . . Kinzie engages her readers in a passionate dialectic proving that ‘it was/Right to live.’”
–Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal

“The quiet but striking poems . . . span the page like spinal cords, or twists of DNA, each word dense and weighted with meaning, thrumming with pent-up power, a tamped-down fire that ignites slowly in the reader’s mind.”
–Dona Seaman, Booklist

“Drift adds luster to Kinzie’s reputation of fine craftsmanship in many styles and forms . . . her lyricism is elegant.”
–Charles Guenther, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Kinzie’s poems attain an expressive restraint, holding their meanings together line by line, one word at a time . . . [her] polish and rigorous observation are manifest.”
–Tom Devaney, Philadelphia Inquirer

“Plato would have been drawn to Mary Kinzie’s remarkable poems and to their vision of the human, assailed and deformed but still thinking . . . the poems themselves are a demonstration of the soul, of the permanent possibility of thought.”
–Martha Nussbaum, Poetry



From the Hardcover edition.