Kerri Webster Selected Works

The Trailhead
Poems

“I'm learning to allow for visions,” the primary speaker of The Trailhead announces, setting out through a landscape populated by swan-killers, war torturers, and kings. Much of the book takes place in the contemporary American West, and these poems reckon with the violence inherent in that place. A “conversion narrative” of sorts, the book examines the self as a “burned-over district,” individual and cultural pain as a crucible in which the book’s sibyls and spinsters are remade, transfigured.

"Sacralization/is when things become holy, also/when vertebrae fuse," the book tells us, pulling at the tensions between secular and sacred embodiment, exposing the essential difficulty of being a speaking woman. The collection arrives at a taut, gendered calling—a firm faith in the power and worth of the female voice—and a broader faith in poetry not as a vehicle of atonement or expiation, but as bulwark against our frailties and failings.

Grand & Arsenal (9781609380915)
Poems

From the intersection of public and private fear, Kerri Webster’s award-winning collection speaks of anxiety and awe, vanishings and reappearances. A city both rises and falls; worlds are simultaneously spoken into being and torn down by words. “This is how time sounds,” Webster writes; this is the hum and click of bodies “desirous of believing we’re all vehicle, every wet atom of us,” even as the saved seeds root in the fallen brickwork and the artifacts pile up: wisdom teeth, hummingbird skulls, plumb bobs, icons, antlers, incandescent bulbs.

We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone (9780820327730)
Poems

“What desire doesn’t seem as of the distance across a sea?” asks the voice in Kerri Webster’s debut collection of poetry, even as the poems attempt the transformation of that liminal space wherein word meets sense, loneliness meets solitude, and surface meets interior. Here, “the surface is our signature,” and the image of stain presents a way for that surface to reflect that which it conceals. In this space, human intimacy encounters the transience and frailty of language, and through these encounters we discover that grace lies in “believing always in imprint.”