American Eclipse

Winner of the 6th Annual Three Mile Harbor Poetry Prize.

In the insightful words of Sarah Sousa, these luminous poems explore "an occluded landscape where wildlife collides with humanity, the country's politics is as out of balance as the climate and the eco-system is losing its rhythms". Alive to nature and the nature of our times, the poems in Kateri Kasek's first full-length collection, "succeed at combining beauty and waste, celebrating the world's lushness and simultaneously knowing the part we play in its devastation." In recording intimate recognizable moments with a naturalist's specificity, Kasek's poems act "as a center of gravity in an off-kilter existence."

"Emily Dickinson characterizes the lives of women as a 'soft eclipse.' In this collection of poems, Kateri Kosek offers us a hard eclipse, as framed by the astonishing account of solar darkness by Annie Dillard. Between the two occultations, we have life as it is experienced by someone who is alive to nature and to the nature of our contemporary culture. In Kosek's AMERICAN ECLIPSE, we find--unveiled--work filled with luminous poetry."--Paul Kane, author of Passing Bell

"What is an eclipse? A strange darkening, an exceptional shadow. But also a strange light, a moment that startles us into new awareness of larger forces we don't usually notice in our daily lives, new questionings of what we thought we saw and knew. 'And when I looked up, the mountains - jagged, / too imposing, I'd thought, to lose - had vanished again, ' writes Kateri Kosek. The poems of AMERICAN ECLIPE consider the world thrown into strange light: by politics, pandemic, intimate sorrow, and climate grief ... Kosek's unflinching eye includes the speaker's own culpability, not asking for forgiveness or approval but, rather, seeking truth's messier, stranger entanglements."--Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry

Poetry. Nature. Family & Relationships.