Little Poems
Alumni, '98 - Creative Writing at The New School
Verve Poetry Press
During the deepest days and nights of spring 2020, Kathleen Ossip, like many of us, was stuck at home and anxious. She found herself turning inward, toward memory, imagination, and immediate domestic and natural environments, with few distractions. The constraints and compressions of daily life—a walking path, a jigsaw puzzle, a partner, rummaging through old notebooks, watching political chaos unfold—resulted in this book of Little Poems.
‘The poet has an uncanny ability to convey what it actually feels like to be alive today…Ossip is one of our foremost ethnographers of contemporary unreality.’ —The Believer
‘The poetry of nerves…is self-evidently, truly American, and this poet is a fine recorder of its devastating little complexities… The eye is restless and relentless, a detail-devourer, a silent machine that has developed, like a diary, a hunger for subtleties… At her acutest she is irresistible.’ —Derek Walcott