Karla Kelsey

Little Knot Motion and Hinge comes out of my ongoing infatuation with phenomenology and landscape, working with what I like to think of as an “exploded” objective correlative—with the idea that if one is walking around in the world with the burden of a secret, one’s perception of the world, and the language that one uses to create and encapsulate this perception, is going to be heavily marked by this burden. In this book I work with this marking via condensed imagery, shifting points of view, and interweaving formal structures. Little Knot Motion and Hinge is broken up, by five meditative poems, into four long sections. The book works as a palimpsest, phrases and events of sections layering over other sections, the “I” of the poems imagining herself at times into a “she,” the landscape and the burden dividing the self from the self as factual moments of perception weave into fictions.

Poems from the work and a video collaboration with Peter can be viewed here, in Octopus Magazine’s Issue # 10. Poems have also appeared in GutCult,Colorado Review, Sonora Review, Interim, LIT, Crazyhorse, and Wild Life.