Kerri Webster is author of the poetry collections Grand & Arsenal (2012), winner of the Iowa Prize, and We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (2005), as well as two chapbooks, Psalm Project (2009) and Rowing through Fog, selected by Carl Phillips as a winner of the Poetry Society’s Chapbook Fellowship (2003). Raised in Idaho, Webster completed her MFA at Indiana University. She has taught in the MFA programs at Washington University in St. Louis and Boise State University, and currently lives in Idaho.Webster’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including the Kenyon Review, Poetry, the Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, At Length, Better, American Poet, the Antioch Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Indiana Review, Newfound, Gulf Coast, Handsome, and the Washington Square Review, among others. Early in her career, Webster won awards from Crazyhorse (Dean Young, judge), River Styx (Mark Doty, judge), the Bellingham Review (Mark Doty, judge), and the Idaho Commission on the Arts.
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We Do Not Eat Our Hearts AlonePoemsFrom"Hotel Thule"
Voluptuous, then merely sticky: to absorb him through my palms. We
were as Danes in Denmark, thus I thought bathwater and longingly,
thought how kneeling hurts the knees, then ghost-gravel. I was
Marriott-air-conditioned unto arctic, not remedied by his warmth
an inch east. I thought surely the ice must calve, then forthwith. Or
was it Ramada, Ramada. In those stories, men stitch coarse blankets
together and spoon, or Strauss-waltz on blinding ice. In those stories,
such measures save no one. What does: deep consummation; marrow
from a shinbone.
We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone : Poems -
We Do Not Eat Our Hearts AlonePoemsFrom"Hotel Voluptuary"
Lucida, obscura, snow. Battery of wind/six hours till dawn/long
ellipsis/hand restless – onanistic night and nothing any fool can do.
Stained, I do not know if you are sleeping. To make a fetish to suffice:
exhausting. Bottle seeds, room keys, wings of things I’ve sworn to
never hurt yet when I sleep there’s something maned there. Roar.
A pubic hair for my locket, a snowstorm for my door – my dears, I’ve
lost too much. Let pink be the color of friction. Let haunting be the
sum of touch.
We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone : Poems -
We Do Not Eat Our Hearts AlonePoemsFrom"The Bird Between Your Body & The World"
Like ice packed in sawdust in the hold of the ship,
my lover was a splendid man.
In the fullness of time, in the fullness of time, wild garlic
under my nails all June, everywhere grass getting long.
Wasn’t he myrrh.
Wasn’t he eucalyptus, just.
We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone : Poems
Selected Works
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Our selection committee found We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone “a lovely, strong, first book, mysterious, ineffable, Charles Olson-like on many levels.”