Transformer

About Kathleen Winter

Kathleen Winter’s poetry collection I will not kick my friends won the Elixir Poetry Prize, and her first book, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award and the Antivenom Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, Agni, Cincinnati Review and Tin House. She received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House, James Merrill House Foundation, Cill Rialaig Project, and Vermont Studio Center. Her awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship at University of Texas’s Dobie Paisano Ranch.

Praise for Transformer

In her new collection, Kathleen Winter moves between the past and the present by magically weaving moments from her own life with those of figures like Henry VIII, John the Baptist, Wolfgang Beurer, and Hieronymus Bosch. That global vision extends to the settings of the poems as well. Winter takes us on an amazing odyssey that migrates from Sonoma to the Pazyryk Valley to Port Aransas to the Luberon to the Colorado Flats to Zurich to Maryland to Italy’s Ligurian Riveria to the Rhode Island Sound to San Francisco. Just as the poems travel through cities and countries, so too do they venture through a vast terrain of poetic forms and an array of emotional landscapes. Like the best journeys, everything in this book feels fresh yet purposeful. A tour de force, Transformer is a masterpiece of literary accomplishment.
—Dean Rader, author of Self Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and Landscape Portrait Figure Form

This world is full of knives and slaps, slammed doors, and cruel words. We see these ominous shadows and drips of terror in Kathleen Winter’s depictions of childhood memories and medieval paintings, written even in the dry bones described at the edges of the archaeologists’ digs. It can seem there is no escape, but the poems in Transformer are spells to bind this violence. Winter binds it with her exquisite knots of interlocking rhyme and rhythm, binds it with her transfixing imagery, she binds this violence with the audacity of boldly speaking its name. These are poems for a new wave of activism, one rooted in telling the truth, in demanding to be believed, in tearing down a silent wall of fear one line at a time.
—Kathryn Nuernberger, author of RUE and The End of Pink