Kelson Books | May 26, 2023
Paperback | 86 pages | US $22
ISBN 978-0-9827838-9-4
In her visionary debut collection, The Saplings Think of Us as Young, California native Kimberly Kralowec explores the intimacy of living in close relationship with extremes of beauty and distress—in both the human and non-human creatures around us.
Kimberly Kralowec’s poems haunt in the best of ways, moving through the loved and marked spaces of our lives. The voice is rhapsodic, songlike, but never lulling: at any moment, the torsions of her syntax may pull you into their undertow. Listening to someone who can “understand the bleached / language of thirst,” we are witness to a distinct, oracular vision. Kralowec sees through the mysteries of the everyday into a transcendent world of strangeness: “I feel again what several people told me did not exist.” We as readers—marvelously—are made to feel it, too.
—Jay Deshpande, author of Love the Stranger
The Saplings Think of Us as Young knows the world not by mere observation but through a kind of fierce participation. The poems draw us beyond words and into images, that murky place where art is primed for the elements of unknowing and mystery. This searching collection rings out far beyond the margins of the human. A fabulous book.
—Michael McGriff, author of Eternal Sentences
Kimberly Kralowec’s poems are deeply aware of the vulnerability of human and more-than-human life. In this time in which disasters have become daily—homes we live inside and move between—Kralowec’s nuanced and sensitive book gives voice to both the grief and beauty of irrevocable transformation and expresses tenderness toward the imperiled phenomenon of human consciousness itself.
—Sarah Rose Nordgren, author of The Creation Museum
The voice in The Saplings Think of Us as Young is a Cassandra—she is a prophet and a careful observer of the climate emergency. The poems are not didactic or sentimental; rather, they bind, knot, and rehabilitate, allowing the speaker’s innerspace to enter the world. Kralowec’s poems insist it’s not too late to care for the Earth, and they serve as beacons for possibility and change. Entering the world of these poems makes it easier to be part of the only environment we share.
—Sean Singer, author of Today in the Taxi
The poems in Kimberly Kralowec’s gorgeous, heart-opening collection are rife with haunting and lyrical lines that illuminate the crisis of climate change. This poetry operates with a precision of image and a juxtaposition of the senses that can only be called signature Kralowec. Yet here, amidst the calamities of a failing planet, stands a love story for the ages. The consistent presence of the speaker’s beloved marks the arc of this dazzling collection, as we travel with the couple into the depths of illness and back out again. “You are the warmest thing in the room,” Kralowec writes, and, “I want to touch you with young hands.” With deft movement and an unparalleled observing eye, Kralowec leads us magnificently and memorably through a persistent trauma of planet and body that ultimately yields to the strength of love, everything “altered just enough to be/unrecognizable, just enough to be beautiful.”
—Jeanine Walker, author of The Two of Them Might Outlast Me
In her fascinating collection, Kimberly Kralowec digs away at the surface layer of our existence to investigate the deeper emotional and moral mechanisms that lie underneath.
—Anatoly Molotkov, author of Future Symptoms