Every Last Thing

$19.00

By Alyse Knorr

“[A]t the condensery / looking for you” describes precisely where Every Last Thing is situated, which is to say at the crossroads of Lorine Niedecker’s sharp Wisconsin chiseling and Walt Whitman’s expansive New York groove. Alyse Knorr has made a Baedeker for a life of love, loss, and loose ends, a life that’s—let’s face it, bravely—at once hers and for all. These poems are genuine and generous, human and humorous. They dare to glow.—Graham Foust, author of Terminations

About Alyse Knorr

Alyse Knorr is an associate professor of English at Regis University, co-editor of Switchback Books, and co-producer of the Sweetbitter podcast. She is the author of the collections Wolf Tours, Ardor, Mega-City Redux, Copper Mother, and Annotated Glass, as well as two non-fiction books on video games. Her work has appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The New Republic, and POETRY Magazine, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.

Praise for Every Last Thing

Every Last Thing thrills between constraint and abandon, “small hungry words” and “limitless want.” Sound compels these lines forward across scattered caesuras and attenuated grammar in Alyse Knorr’s singular prosody. Not even the couplets or tercets are entirely familiar and yet these poems come together with profound existential order (“not a dreamline but a plot”). Knorr asks the totally ordinary, not at all ordinary question: what makes a life? And as a reader I, too, “am stilled by this / bombardment” of accidents, memory’s artifacts, life in relation—it is achingly beautiful. This book reminds me what poetry is for. As Knorr says, “a soft song that / if I could write this down / would explain it all at once.”—Stefania Heim, author of Hour Book