INHERITANCE BY KATHRYN SMITH
We’re both afraid of the brain deteriorating before the body and of swimming, or drowning, which, to me, seems the same. When I was small, I was certain that one day the padded wall of the elementary school gymnasium would open to flood the room with chlorinated water. What made me believe such a thing would happen? There’s a photograph of me as an infant crawling straight for the incoming tide. Somewhere in the few years between, fear crept in like an insect, so light you can’t feel it until it bites. She knows deterioration of the body already, and the brain fog that follows
Spokane poet Kathryn Smith.
YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
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DISTINCT VOICE
Spokane poet Kathryn Smith’s new book offers sometimes scary, often stunning look at our world BY DAN NAILEN
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he poem, even the lifelong pull of actually being a poet, comes from some mysterious place. There was no one poem that inspired Kathryn Smith and sent her on her path, at least not that she recalls. Not a particular teacher in high school, or a poet newly discovered, that gave the 43-year-old an “aha!” moment. “I did kind of grow up interested in it when I was in high school, and started reading poetry,” Smith says. “It was just something I connected with, and that interest and fascination continued, I guess.” That’s a bit of an understatement. Smith’s new collection, Self-Portrait with Cephalopod, arrives
Feb. 9 via Milkweed Editions, and it’s already won a Jake Adam York Prize given to an outstanding first or second collection of poetry. It’s a follow-up to her Book of Exodus and her prize-winning chapbook Chosen Companions of the Goblin. The works in the 88-page Cephalopod veer from intense and disturbing to laugh-out-loud hilarious, as Smith addresses everything from environmental disasters and the natural world to personal loss and celebrity culture as reflected by the media. While the subject matter might sound like it sprawls, the poems collected make it obvious you’re reading a distinct voice. And an intense one at that. ...continued on next page
like an overprotective parent. Love is knitted there, in the vessel I will wash with a damp cloth when she is dying. Will I? I am not tender, impatient with requests, though I’ve been known to bathe an ailing hen, to shoo ants intent on thieving grubs from a wasp’s fallen nest. Yesterday, I reached a blind hand to prize lettuce from its root and plunged the tip of my index finger straight into a wasp’s stinger. Now everything I point to is pain. Last time she called, she asked what she should do with the stack of music she found shoved in the hall closet, blooming with mold. It was her mother’s, so she was sad to lose it, but she didn’t know what she was going to do with it anyway. From Self-Portrait with Cephalopod by Kathryn Smith (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Kathryn Smith. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org
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