The Ice House by Genevieve Kaplan

Winner of the A Room Of Her Own Foundation, Genevieve Kaplan’s collection of poems, In The Ice House, is filled with enticing landscapes and evocative language. Published by Red Hen Press, the poems are light and dark, dust and life, they are beautiful and enjoyable to read. Genevieve Kaplan hails from San Francisco, California and is the founding editor of Toad Press international chapbook series and is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. She has had poems and essays published in numerous places including Jubilat, Gulf Coast, fence, Northwest Review, and more. This is her first full length collection of poems and I am happy to share a few poems with you:

The Forest and the Trees

Shake to the ground. The motion
a puzzle. The fence slats rattle.


The dust in the air enough to drown in.

I picture a very hot, windy day where the poet looks out her window and sees such a scene. The tree limbs fall creating the missing puzzle pieces of the tree, the dust obscuring the view of the dust storm. The poem reminds me of living in West Texas, I wonder where Genevieve found the inspiration for this poem?



The Birds

For fish that fly, and birds, a noise
Awakened in the street. No way
to mend their beer-battered wings. Their
short sighs in the street,
so far from my own room.

How can the words “beer-battered wings” not catch your eye? Especially with the mention of fish in the first line which almost tricks your eye into thinking “beer-battered fish” instead. The poem itself makes me think of leaving the windows open on a nice day and hearing the birds, the sound of fish jumping in a river, the sounds distant. As for the beer-battered wings, I am not sure if she means that the birds seem inexplicably weighted down but I love the language of it. Again, I wonder what her inspiration was for this poem.


In The Kitchen

Tap of the fly
on the wall. Against
the pane.

Far from the slowness morning
has to offer.

One day
the plants are dying and the next
they are alive.

This poem is a snapshot of the poet’s kitchen to me. It is so quiet you can hear a fly tap on the window pane which draws the poet’s attention to plants resting on the window sill and there they are green and recovering from being watered and refreshed. I can relate to such a moment in my own kitchen and this poem is selfishly plucked for presentation here just because I can relate to the poem in my own way.

If you enjoyed this short sample then I urge you to purchase a copy of In The Ice House by Genevieve Kaplan and published by Red Hen Press for $16.95 by following the link below:
http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=7FA7E43F-A862-D13A-B9AD-8B1AEBDDBA1E

Thanks always for reading, please click in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…