About Nicole Callihan
Nicole Callihan writes poems and stories. Her books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023), SuperLoop (Sock Monkey 2014), and the poetry chapbooks The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White), as well as a novella, The Couples. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. She has received support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ludwig Vogelstein, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. SLIP, which won an Alma Award, will be published by Saturnalia in Spring 2025. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.
Praise for chigger ridge
The poems in Nicole Callihan’s exhilarating chigger ridge move in revved-up staccato bursts, each one straining against its brevity with the energy of a wasp battering a jam
jar’s glass. This is a searing, breathtaking book, a kaleidoscopic exploration of place and self that’s fueled by interjections of astonishment and grief. I love how these poems push against the conventions of language, commingling the colloquial with scraps from the literary canon and sifting obsessively through shards of memory as they grapple toward a truth “as plain and massive as the sky.” —Matt Donovan, author of The Dug-Up Gun Museum
The poems in chigger ridge sound out the rich ambivalence in the poet’s senses of what makes up a self and its endless enmeshments with the material world. There are country matters here, pastoral concerns woven into impressions of place, family, and the dramas of love and becoming. Yet the attitude of immediacy and intimacy signaled by these unpunctuated, one-word titled poems is streaked with onomatopoeia, sibilance, frecklings of knowing wordplay. This counterpoint cuts against the romantic ache of nostalgia and infatuation with ruin; they are composed, and so they can offer up emotional verisimilitude. —Sandra Lim, author of The Curious Thing
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