In Search of Warm Breathing Things

"Is anything common?" Katherine Gekker asks in her debut collection, In Search of Warm Breathing Things. The answer, in these richly detailed poems, is no. Gekker is a keen observer, able to "unlock the beauty hidden" in the ordinary. An iridescent grackle becomes a symbol of hope, "collarbones shimmer like wings." Weaving images of the natural world with glimpses of a struggling marriage, Gekker portrays life in all its emotional complexity. "Two bees are fighting or courting-- I can't tell which," she writes in "To Cast a Shadow Again." Yet there are moments of joy, the promise of transformation. "My shift billows, diaphanous.... I can seduce anyone tonight beneath fronds slicing like blades."

-- Ellen Bass