Kayaköy by Jeri Onitskansky
Your struggle will become the best thing about you.
Only your mind will be able to decipher your thoughts, like
needing scissors to open a pack of scissors.
(from ‘Fortune Poem’)
“KAYAKÖY offers us a fascinating guide to life’s sweet and sour, to tragedy and what grounds we have for hope. Moments in a child’s life – collecting minnows, blowing dandelions – are preternaturally lit, yet suffused in retrospect with a longing for grace. Innocence is exchanged for adulthood – but for Onitskansky, the breaking down of ice in a thaw is also the gift of freedom for what has long languished beneath. These poems explore nothing less than the life-process, powerfully played out here in the sudden death of a father and the wounding of marital break-up. From it all, the poet emerges strongly as both ‘ponderer’ and ‘wonderer’ (‘Delver’s Dirt’).”
—Martyn Crucefix
“These poems have enviable life force. Energized to their core – in language, syntax and image – they celebrate the ‘merry bedlam’ of our creaturely planet, and the beauty and oddity of being alive.”
—Kathryn Maris
Blue Diode
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