You Carry the Woods

No two ages of life encounter precisely the same moments. If poetry relies on the rendering of experience so genuine as to wake the imagination, the poems from Kimberly Pavlovich's first book are admirable in their unflinching courage and versatility. Between the lines, we see emerging a literary Romantic, with an eye for the strange beauty of unseemliness (or, as Hopkins put it, "pied beauty"). The wonderfully titled You Carry the Woods makes for an auspicious beginning. Michael Todd Steffen, author of Partner, Orchard, Day Moon (Cervena Barva Press, 2014).