Kristen Case

Little Arias Kristen Case

Publisher Marketing: Book of thisness, book of withness, book of now: Kristen Case's Little Arias meticulously situates a woman's consciousness in the immediacy of relation: with language, objects, other people, and the present tense. There is in these poems a marvelous fullness to each relation recorded, rendered so by the author's belief 'That a sentence might become a habitable room into which others might wander and in which certain moods, certain thoughts, certain ghosts of the possible might find form.' What makes this book so poignant, however, is its fierce commitment to also recording moods and thoughts that at first would seem to negate relation: absence, loss, and solitude all find their place here, paradoxically, as part of possibility, the fullness of being in the world. To read this intelligent, wise book is 'to have swallowed an openness' that starts at the heart. Brian Teare"

Contributor Bio:  Case, Kristen Kristen Case is the author of the critical study American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Chelsea, The Brooklyn Review, Pleiades, Saint Ann's Review, The Iowa Review, Wave Composition, and ELEVEN ELEVEN. Her chapbook, Temple, was published by MIEL Books in 2014. She is the editor of The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies and co-editor of Thoreau at Two-Hundred: Essays and Reassessments, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She has published several articles on Thoreau, and has also written on Pound, Frost, Stevens, and others. She lives in Temple, Maine and teaches American literature at the University of Maine at Farmington.