Anchorhold

Seeking a personal prayer in every place, ANCHORHOLD refuses to let go of holiness or humanity, simultaneously clutching both. The collection introduces a half-real, half-imagined place where "a form/and beauty [are] uniquely" the individual's. Laura M. Kaminski reminds us what it is like to be what we create in the world. Like the eponymous creature of Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider" striving to connect the spheres with its frequent webbing, then, Kaminski's ANCHORHOLD seeks to reconnect people to their humanity and an internal divinity often overlooked. This necessary collection is an homage to small mercies, simple good deeds, and nature's abundant gifts. In every piece, Kaminski makes "time to create/one more watery Eden, one more hidden garden" worth exploring. Everyone has their secrets; everyone is scrutinized for whether or not they can be trusted. But there is hope everywhere, too-that even the "leaded glass/from your old RCA television" may become a reincarnated being, part of a miracle we are "blessed to witness." There is a holiness to ANCHORHOLD, a devotion to the domestic, disheveled, and divine alike. Life is less an anchored vessel than an unmoored, drifting one. The "anchorhold" is not sought so much as needing to be broken at times so that the figures populating Laura M. Kaminski's collection may thus reconnect elsewhere. By the finale, when we wonder, like the speaker, "if we'll be allowed to leave," we know that even when we do, we'll continue dwelling upon this re-envisioned world of what it means to be singular-what it means to be our own, sacred selves. - Cristina J. Baptista, author of THE DROWNING BOOK