Kathleen Peirce graduated with an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer's workshop and has published several collections of poetry. Peirce won the Williams Carlos Williams award and received the Iowa Prize. She lives in Wimberly, Texas, with her son and is a faculty member of Texas State University's MFA program.
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MercyPoemsFrom"The Raptor Center"
I saw inside the body of a man. The intern drew me
through the otherwise locked door; still in my hands
were eight glass vials the pharmacist had sent for,
to keep the glittering permanganate. That was my favorite task,
the weighing and dilution of the violet douche,
administered before the hysterectomies. In autopsy, he’d opened
like a box his arms had fallen from, neither looking at me
or away. As if he’d come through wind,
his hair was mussed. There was a funnel and a drain
inside the floor. And today I saw a sidewalk in the woods,
the handsome wooden cages and the smallest gravel pearls
smoothed around the bottoms of the trees, and then
a shock of feathers lifted on the damaged eagle’s head.
And the kestrel was afraid. Its open wing, so rarely looked down on
is gray, rust, black, and gray again, and black, and I have,
once today, felt my body drawn across its gaze. That one
with the vivid dragging wing, and then from underneath
I felt the other hovering.
Mercy:Poems -
MercyPoemsFrom"Begging the Question"
The yellow tom is running with his head thrown
back, among the trees the cows have rubbed
their necks on. The rabbit in his jaws is gray
and wobbling. The cat’s leg must be only barely
healed, bitten out above the paw last week. The red
roses that I bought you, love, are dropping,
barely open. I’m watching from the chair.
The cat is no more angry at the rabbit than
the cattle at the grass. Come and eat.
Mercy:Poems -
MercyPoemsFrom"The Alcoholic’s Son at Ten"
wants to be finished waiting in the car. He ate his pear
as slowly as he could.
The shame that he has learned just recently,
while even its ugliness would not love him,
makes his best desires strange. Holding
the core inside his mouth, he rolls the window down.
The father-air flies out. Though the car weaves, the world still
passes sideways as it should.
He throws that one thought out to many marks, and leans
to spit his pear. Being gone, it can’t reveal the joy
of leaving. But it does.
Mercy:Poems
“As a book—a ‘man-made thing / contrived for widening [our] lives’—this one has an unusual and specific function. It works, somehow, as an entering wedge, or lever, with which to pry us at least momentarily loose from our habitual ways of seeing and acting, precisely by making us aware of what, in fact, they are—and without even the lure of a strong identification with another persona’s ‘story’ or drama, as most of the events noted here are seductively plain and mundane—routine, as well as collective; in short, the usual . . . That the poems are also incredibly beautiful is part of their spell, part of what allows them to be useful in this exact way—and so, by accumulation, they become a string of pearls—literal and lustrous with wisdom.” —Poetry International [on The Ardors]
“Like dreams and pearls, the poems in Kathleen Peirce’s The Ardors are driven by the intense heat of ancient obsessions trying to break free. Although strongly personal and even confessional, the voice in Peirce’s poems comes through not ‘I’ but the more universal ‘we,’ which both expands the reader's view and simultaneously dislocates the pain expressed. This produces an odd sense of place, not quite reality, but also not quite dream. It is a landscape where looking at ‘A single snail baffle[s] us,’ and where we are asked questions like ‘Do you hear / how morning feels?’ Yet, these are not simply exercises in strangeness; they are poems in which the strange points directly at the contradictions of our lives . . . The Ardors is an unsettling book that travels deeply into the human psyche. Full of startling lines like ‘How flammable / the smallest sorrows are,’ it is both a censure of the human ego and a testament to the fragility of human joys. In a world where many things can become obsessions, poems like these should be placed high on the list of candidates.” —Rain Taxi Review of Books
“The poems are inspired by loss in the middle of life and the relationship of this loss to desire. What is most distinctive, however, about Peirce's struggle with the carnal is the way in which the inanimate world reveals the spiritual. Objects in time, in dream, in memory—'a dress fastened to a tree,' 'a soldier with a vase inside'—take on a vivid architectural quality that converges with her odd phrasing and direct, philosophical approach to result in an image that is nearly fused with the meditation. This book does not sound like anything else being written today.” —Boston Review [on The Oval Hour]
Selected Works
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