God Loves You

Kathryn Maris is from New York City. She has won a Pushcart Prize, an Academy of American Poets award and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and Yaddo. She lives in London, where she teaches creative writing and writes essays and reviews. God Loves You is her second collection of poems.

'Maris's poems strike me as an unlikely marriage between Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath - the aesthete playing on the edges of her own nerves, examining the myth of herself, skirting and side-stepping the blunt charges of language and loss the way an intellectual matador might sidestep a bull. It is a pretty enthralling performance. Maris carries the small bright sword of wit rather conspicuously so the bull might know she is not defenceless and the glitter of the wit arrests us too - This has a Dorothy Parker air, metropolitan and crowded, intimate with other lives whose own limits may never be known.' - George Szirtes in Poetry London "My mind is open, / so the devil can get in" says the speaker of "Knowledge is a Good Thing," and there's a delicious sense of both open-mindedness and devilry in Maris's work. Her company is quirky, stimulating and sparklingly intelligent. You could say she's like Sylvia Plath with added chutzpah. But, really, Kathryn Maris is like no-one but herself. - Carol Rumens