About the Book
In this award-winning, debut poetry collection, K.E. Ogden turns our gaze to mapping grief as a transformative journey of resilience. Five poems in the collection have been honored, including "Mapping the Route," a winner of the 2022 Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Prize and featured on the Academy of American Poets website. This first poem in the book explores the tension between our past nostalgia and longings and our present homes. In the midst of a father's love for his daughter, there are directions given. These poems are songs of devotion to "all the chaos and misery and hope that simmers . . . in the minds of people," as poet Jimmy Baca shared. There is mud and bird shit, there are bones and dead bodies, there are hot biscuits and a cat's torn ear, and shovels, and sawdust. These poems do offer comfort during tough times, a map for transcending grief and turning tragedy into gateways for metamorphosis. Ogden's poems invite you to make new worlds in changed landscapes, to see beauty in dark, shark-infested waters, and to find elation and joy in being alive.
About the Author :
K.E. Ogden is a poet, essayist, book artist and educator. Kirsten grew up in Honolulu, Hawai'i and the SF Bay Area, and she spent almost every summer of her teen and twenty-something years in East Louisiana roaming the backroads with her grandmother. She loves writing on porches and still uses a typewriter for most things. A poet laureate of Gambier, Ohio, she teaches in Gambier each summer with the Kenyon Review Young Writer workshops and is one of the founding bloggers for KRO: Kenyon Review Online. A two-time judge for the Flannery O'Connor short fiction prize, Kirsten is also a former recipient of a Poetry Fellowship to Changsha, China from the CSULA Center for Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and a winner of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Award for her poem "My Atoms Come from Those Stars." Her essays, poetry, and fiction have been published in Brevity, KRO: Kenyon Review Online, Louisiana Literature, Streetlight Magazine, Windhover, andberbo and elsewhere. Her digital quilt piece "My President: A Politics of Hope" was published at UnstitchedStates.com as part of a project curated by writer Gretchen Henderson. Kirsten is a certified Narrative Therapist and chairs the Creative Writing Committee at Pasadena City College. She believes that writing and poetry have the power to heal and to change the world. To learn more, visit her website at kirstenogden.com
Review :
K.E. Ogden's stunning chapbook, What the Body Already Knows, is a journey through grief for a father who "hung the sun" and a troubled mother who lives in memory as "fingerprints in the tops of all those biscuits." Every poem is rooted in the world of the body-of those we love, of the earth, and of the sea, where the poet surprises herself by "singing underwater," a perfect metaphor for what Ogden's poetry accomplishes: a music all her own, rising, above all odds, from sorrow's depths.
Rebecca McClanahan
Author of In the Key of New York City and The Tribal Knot
Every once in a precious while, a book comes into my life that shakes me out of my long days and worries, one that offers me honesty and real connection to its author. K.E. Ogden's new collection of poetry, What the Body Already Knows, is exactly that kind of book. These poems provide an atlas of loss, both to it and away from it, line by line. Whether telling the story of a mother lost in her sleep, a day lost to rumination over the corpse of a deer, or an entire year lost to loss itself, these poems show a way through it all. Yes, there is pain here, and fear, hospital rooms, and heavy memories from hard days, but these poems are much more than specimens lined up as examples of troubles in a drawer. They are alive, and colorful, and covered in all manner of beauty to render life's real value.
Jack B. Bedell
Author of Color All Maps New
Poet Laureate, State of Louisiana, 2017-2019
K. E. Ogden's What the Body Already Knows begins with a father highlighting for his daughter the way out. Of course there is no way out. This collection chronicles the "year of forgot to breathe," the year both parents die. In a pastoral scene, we see the pond filled with tires and truck parts, the pond where they throw in a dead deer on the count of three. These harsh, beautiful poems stun us with honesty, grit, and transformation.
Peggy Shumaker
Author of CAIRN and Gnawed Bones
The skillful and heartfelt elegies of Kirsten Ogden's What the Body Already Knows show us the whole world-its people and elements and animals-in dynamic mourning. In poems about the terror and splendor of life passing, of losing parents, of finding new anxieties and new joys in parenthood, Ogden's voice is at times lyrical and at times irreverent, but always well rendered and always humane: 'When I woke this morning, I wasn't yet / an orphan.' The poet restlessly seeks "synonyms for grief" in her crisp language and startling figurations. Even in the face of loss, Ogden reminds us the world is fragile, but the world is beautiful.
Richie Hofmann
Author of A Hundred Lovers and Second Empire
What the Body Already Knows reminds us that grief does not have just one form. It is not just solid, not just emotional terrain, not just morphing bodies & time, it takes every form of matter. Ogden's work asks us to break open the cycles we come from & to be among grief's great disruption to our relational rhythms. How when our people go beyond, especially parents/parental figures, they don't leave, but how we are with each other becomes new. How in the midst of great grief comes change where we find new selves. The language in this book creates striking & surprising landscapes. Ogden's uses of form & symbolism build meditations on duality & coupling in the midst of transition. This simmering collection asks us to pull up a chair to grief's wake, welcome the deviations that arise & change the cycles we claim for ourselves.
Nabila Lovelace
Author of Sons of Achilles
