Katherine McCord
Island

Flying over a sea
she thinks of him.
How it’s between her and God,
this man who empties her
mid-air.
He’s everything, isn’t he?
The distant?
Those gone?
The subdued island of people she doesn’t know.
When she eats it’s his food.
When she disappears, she loses his things,
his clothes.
She’s done it now
coming here alone
without her passport
to live the life of a woman
he’d love.

62 Pages
$15
isbn 1-882983-84-x

“[Katherine McCord] is a remarkable poet whose work is certain and hesitant at once, compressed and expansive. She wants silence to speak as carefully as her words. She sees poetry in the purest sense, working toward pieces where important things aren’t merely described or reported but transformed. Katherine McCord is an artist, through and through, taking aspects of ordinary life and finding fear and wonder in them.”
—-Marianne Boruch

“The pared inscription, as well as the delicacy and discretion, of Katherine McCord’s debut collection, Island, are always deeply compelling and often breathtaking. The honorable simplicity of this work rewards us time and time again with both wisdom and delight. Quietly elegant, and as intimate as a whisper, this is a book to hold close in the silence of night. ”
--David St. John

Katherine McCord was a 1999 “Discovery”/The Nation Poetry Contest semifinalist. Among many journals, her work has been included in the Chester H. Jones Foundation’s 1996 volume of national poetry competition winners. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing/Poetry from New Mexico State University. As an undergraduate, she won the Homer Pittard Creative Writing Scholarship. She teaches Creative Writing/Poetry at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and lives with her partner, the physicist Tom Ruekgauer, and their two daughters in Socorro, New Mexico.

From Southwest Bookviews:
Reading and re-reading Katherine McCord's debut volume of poems, I was touched with feelings of discovery, surprise, loneliness, sadness, and the realization that this woman's simple, elegant words had directed me to these feelings in careful, subtle, and often very beautiful ways.
           McCord's small book is divided into three sections. The first is about her early life, marked by her father leaving the family, but is dominated (or rather taken over) by the long meditative poem "over This Bridge," in which a pedestrian has been struck "and prays for the side of the road./What could I have done?/Help him die better,/help him remember,/not what happened,/but me?"
           The second section, possessed of the fascinating title, "Of a Worried God," contains a long elegant poem in short stanzas called "Letters After Miscarriage," which frankly is so lovely I wish I had written it. Here is one stanza: "Downhill toward the heart,/ I can see in the windows./Our second child asleep,/we turn on our dark street/where the older children linger/under streetlights. What floods me/is not what's gone, the moon, the sun,/but how I call your name,/higher now, more pain,/until it's not the sky/but here, my hands /washed with sweet you."
           The last section is called "Island," and the book ends, as it has begun, with a poem questioning the ideas "island" raises.
           One of the striking features of these poems is the way the poet calls her God; often it is as though she needs to help God understand her searches: "What is it, God? she asks Him, then, 'Is that you, God,/standing by the ochre barrel…./Is it your dog/who's gone…."
           McCord's is a searching poetry, asking questions that have answers too hard to bear. A kind of determinism seems invoked in many of the poems. The poet announces this theme in the lead poem, "After Muriel Rukeyser's 'Islands'"—"But water surrounds./It's not as if you can/climb down./…Even the moon, round and perfect,/and born of dark,/lies/on water/because it has nowhere/else to go."
           Katherine McCord earned her MFA from Warren Wilson in Swannonoa, North Carolina, and was a 1999 Discovery/The Nation Poetry Contest semifinalist. She teaches creative writing and poetry at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and lives with her partner, the physicist Tom Ruekgauer, and their two daughters in Socorro, New Mexico. Within the pages of this fine book there is much worth pursuing of quiet elegance and simple beauty.

          —Sheila Cowing
Southwest Bookviews, Autumn 2003, C. Versace/Southwest Bookviews/7 Ave. Vista Grande #228/Santa Fe, New Mexico 87508-9199