Irresistible, wrote Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott when he selected Kathleen Ossip's The Search Engine for the Honickman Prize from more than 1000 manuscripts. You feel like quoting her, Walcott continued, because she is . . . so fresh and so open. Ossip's poetry is word-rich and music-lush, infused with fastidious hilarity and a genuine intelligence. It is a poetry of nerves, with a hunger for subtlety. She admits her influences easily, using pop songs and academic quotes in a self-confessed, even parodic search for her voice. As Richard Howard remarks: An astonishment, this first book, and what a comfort Kathleen Ossip teaches at The New School. Her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry and The Paris Review. She lives outside New York City.
