Enough

My Narcissus My narcissus was a gift, a raw round heart encased in paper brown skin that flaked off in my hands. He slept in my palm, nestled into the dark space as my thumb closed around him. After I put him into his bed, covered with cold earth, I waited, and he opened his fist, reached up through the soil with his three fingered hand. You know the rest of the story, how he became lost in himself, drowned in his idea of himself. All that's left now is his withered body, cut off, turning to dirt, the snow slowly burying him. But his heart, the one I loved first, beats underground. Kris Bigalk's second full-length collection, Enough, traces the interplay between the experience of codependency and the myths of Echo and Narcissus. Lyrical, raw, and honest, these poems invite us to consider what it means to be satisfied, how to make peace with each other and ourselves, and how to know when enough is enough.

About the Author :
Kris Bigalk has authored two poetry collections published by NYQ Books: Repeat the Flesh in Numbers (2012) and Enough (2019). Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies, including Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology and The Night's Magician: Poems About the Moon, and she has won two Minnesota State Arts Board Individual Artist Grants in Poetry. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Rumpus and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. She founded and now directs the creative writing program at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Review :
Enough is a scintillating collection of individual poems that reads brilliantly as one arc, recasting the Echo/Narcissus story in terms of modern love. It is enthralling to see how Kris Bigalk takes ownership of the myth, employing an Echo-like narrator in many of these poems to explore the difficulties of loving a contemporary narcissist. As can happen in such a relationship, fine china becomes tiny knives when the perception gets shattered. Here, it is the reader who becomes engrossed in the reflection found in this nuanced and moving new telling. Highly recommended. --BJ Ward, author of the Paterson Prize winning Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems, 1990-2013 To say the poems in Kris Bigalk's Enough are vivid understates their power. "Our language," says the speaker in the poem of that title, "is made of small words, muscular, kinetic," an apt description for these stunning and up-close poems of love, loss, and stillness. The language in some of these poems conveys palpable energy. In others it stands in muscular quiet. In a spare, well-focused moment or two, it also finds the point that is just enough. --Margaret Rozga, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin The single word "enough" functions as the perfect conceit and duality for Kris Bigalk's latest collection. The poems move from the intense sensuality of a relationship in which the desire the speaker feels for the "you" is never adequately reciprocated or enough, to the unsuccessful attempts at finding a mere satisfaction or what will suffice, to the speaker, heartbroken, finally having enough and working toward letting go. Accentuating this journey of desire, loss and longing, then contemplation and recovery is the myth of Echo and Narcissus, which ribbons its way both overtly and subtly through the collection. However, Bigalk recapitulates the myth, allowing the speaker a path to healing, thus refusing to reduce the speaker to complete despair over unrequited love, as Ovid does, turning a heartbroken nymph to a mere echo. --Adam Vines, editor of Birmingham Poetry Review