Kralowec, Kimberly: The Saplings Think of Us As Young

Kelson Books, paperback

Publication Date: May 26, 2023

Publisher Marketing: The poems in Kimberly Kralowec's gorgeous, heart-opening collection are rife with haunting and lyrical lines that illuminate the crisis of climate change.

In her visionary debut collection, The Saplings Think of Us as Young, California native Kimberly Kralowec explores the intimacy of living in close relationship with extremes of beauty and distress - in both the human and non-human creatures around us.

"Kimberly Kralowec's poems haunt in the best of ways, moving through the loved and marked spaces of our lives. The voice is rhapsodic, songlike, but never lulling: at any moment, the torsions of her syntax may pull you into their undertow. Listening to someone who can 'understand the bleached / language of thirst, ' we are witness to a distinct, oracular vision. Kralowec sees through the mysteries of the everyday into a transcendent world of strangeness: 'I feel again what several people told me did not exist.' We as readers--marvelously--are made to feel it, too."--Jay Deshpande, author of Love the Stranger

"The Saplings Think of Us as Young knows the world not by mere observation but through a kind of fierce participation. The poems draw us beyond words and into images, that murky place where art is primed for the elements of unknowing and mystery. This searching collection rings out far beyond the margins of the human. A fabulous book."-- Michael McGriff, author of Eternal Sentences

"Kimberly Kralowec's poems are deeply aware of the vulnerability of human and more-than-human life. In this time in which disasters have become daily--homes we live inside and move between--Kralowec's nuanced and sensitive book gives voice to both the grief and beauty of irrevocable transformation and expresses tenderness toward the imperiled phenomenon of human consciousness itself."--Sarah Rose Nordgren, author of The Creation Museum