"your face had transformed
from male—to musk—your floral
all that was left to sense"
—from "[You stood there, pre-dreamed]"

My poetry chapbook, We retreat into the stillness of our own bones (Tolsun Books 2022), is a sequence of untitled poems exploring the multi-layered intimacy of close relationships and private spaces. Some have previously appeared in journals. The book is dedicated to my husband, during whose serious illness many of the poems were written. The stunning cover and interior art is by my immensely talented sister, Kathleen Kralowec. To order, click here. For the media sheet, click here.

Praise for We retreat into the stillness of our own bones:

"This brilliant, magnetic chapbook moves with an evocative and acute intensity, quietly transforming the microscopic into the vast, and the vast into the microscopic. It is a journey of a book, full of movement, beauty, love, and grief. Imagine a world in which we can 'let the bees breathe … for the parts of the skin the light goes through,' or in which 'plant[ing] light / in small spaces, / false gems' is a possible task. Kralowec’s We retreat into the stillness of our own bones is Sublime in a way only dreams and poems can be." — Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Bone Map

"With a painterly eye towards detail, and deeply grounded in the natural world, these lacy, atmospheric poems are unabashed in their bold ambition to chart the vagaries, rhythms, frailties and complexity of what it means to be close to another human—to see and be seen." — Louise Mathias, author of The Traps

"The images in Kimberly Kralowec’s We retreat into the stillness of our own bones take on such stunning musculature that they lift these lyrics over the head of the speaker, their whole weight a work of dynamic specificity. 'We find twilights of reef birds/in new corners of the house— / though our eyes are still closed / and our rooms long ago abandoned the rectangular.' These poems remind us that we are active participants in language that is forever recalibrating what it means to love the world." — Kimberly Burwick, author of Out Beyond the Land

"Charles Simic wrote about the 'art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image.' In her debut collection, Kimberly Kralowec elevates this concept beyond the visual, awakening all our senses to new ways of engaging within our emotional and physical landscapes. With subtle eloquence, she uncovers the keen edge between strength and vulnerability 'when not every brightening / turns out to be dawn.'" —Linda Jackson Collins, author of Painting Trees

Endless thanks to Sara, Louise, Kim and Linda for their lovely and generous words, and to Tolsun Books for believing in my work.