KATE COLBY SPECIAL

This set of 3 titles by Kate Colby comes discounted and specially wrapped, to celebrate her 2019 reading at the Poetry Project:

I Mean (2015) 

The Return Of the Native (2011)

Unbecoming Behavior (2008)

More on each title:

I Mean, Colby's 7th book, is a personal ars poetica. In a long, cumulative poem and a collection of lyric essays she explores how meaning is made and denied in and by art and language.

Praise for I Mean:

"In this stunning collection of poetry and lyric essay, Kate Colby ruminates iteratively, almost recursively over questions of scale and knowability... Colby grasps again and again at the ineffable or rather the almost-effable—she does not want to capture X so much as to convey X through the grasping itself, to circumscribe what can’t be expressed. At times, she achieves this so spectacularly—in “moments of euphoric clarity”—it makes me want to cry."

—Elisa Gabbert

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The Return of the Native is both a pastoral and its counterpoint. A series of 23 poems, it enacts a struggle between the romance of recorded history and the social conditions of the global present. Topical threads include New England colonial, American folk, and Native American history; the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts; and the specious gloss of American “road” culture, all filtered through a fine mesh of Thomas Hardy.

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Unbecoming Behavior is part autobiography, part revisionist treatment of the life of midcentury writer and iconoclast Jane Bowles, tracing personal historicity, persona, performance, femininity, travel, exile, home, storytelling, and the act of writing itself.

Praise for Unbecoming Behavior:

"To use her own words, Kate Colby’s poetry 'cannibalizes' and 'interbreeds' with itself, with the author’s life, and with the work and life of Jane Bowles, the great 20th century fiction writer and playwright. This booklength poem creates its own trajectory—a set of rapid explosions which transform into caresses...  Unbecoming Behavior is hyper-active to the extreme, and a step onwards."

—Lewis Warsh