Kathy Fagan

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a “fatal diagnosis,” how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body “meant to bend & breed” opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our “common griefs” so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these—a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a “child who won’t ever get born”: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. “You think your one life precious—”And Bad Hobby thinks—hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces “inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us.” And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. “Don’t worry, baby,” Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. “We’re okay.”

Meditative and richly written, this collection of poems by Kathy Fagan takes the sycamore as its inspiration--and delivers precise, luminous insights on lost love, nature, and the process of recovery. "It is the season of separation & falling / Away," Fagan writes. And so--like the abundance of summer diminishing to winter, and like the bark of the sycamore, which sheds to allow the tree's expansion--the speaker of these poems documents a painful loss and tenuous rebirth, which take shape against a forested landscape. Black walnuts fall where no one can eat or smell them. Cottonwood sends out feverish signals of pollen. And everywhere are sycamores, informed by Fagan's scientific and mythological research. Spellbinding and ambitious, Sycamore is an important new work from a writer whose poems "gleam like pearls or slowly burning stones" (Philip Levine).

"Kathy Fagan's The Charm works the true spells of childhood, the superstitions of romance, the bewitching alchemies of words themselves and casts us sun-struck in our lives - doomed, yes, but 'dovewinged.' Fact, speculation, nostalgia, and mystery are wielded with equal power and stunning craft. Fagan is writing some of the wisest and alluring poems of our day." -Beckian Fritz Goldberg"There is something both very old and very new - archaic and postmodern - in Kathy Fagan's wise-cracking charms to assuage rage and despair, to ward off misfortune and heartbreak. The Charm dissolves the leaden circles in the air and charms with fresh carols." -Edward Hirsch"Kathy Fagan's rage is subtle, her loves draw you in, and there is a driving curiosity that comes only with great respect for life." -Bob HicokKathy Fagan is the author of Lip, Moving & St Rage, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry, and The Raft, a National Poetry Series selection. She is professor of English at Ohio State University.

In this stunning fourth collection, Kathy Fagan expands her ongoing engagement of voice and persona across the borders of both traditional and experimental poetic lines. A book of monologues, portraits, and arias, Lip directs our attention to the sometimes literal ropes and pulleys of the human stage, those operating just out of sight and earshot: the understructure and the undervoice. Fagan's speakers-historical, anonymous, and often subversively female-hold forth, hold back, enfold and unleash in forms as multiply textured as their experience. Always, hovering at the mouth of the vessel, in the margin of speech, is lip: anatomical and botanical, sexual and slang, servile and insolent.