Little Arias

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