Last Resort
©2024 Kathleen Byrd
Trade Paperback | 6 x 9
ISBN-13: 978-1-944234-60-7
Kathleen Byrd’s poems are keenly attentive to landscape and lineage, “mammalian murmurs” and the “humble grinding of grit.” Like the wings of the majestic herons she watches, these lines “stitch time” with sound and sight.
—Stefania Heim, author of the poetry collections HOUR BOOK and A Table That Goes On for Miles and translator of Geometry of Shadows.
The poems in Last Resort are full not only of wonder and delight, but also an uncanny ability to hold the conflicting truths of our historic moment and bear the weight of our collective grief. Every time I return to these poems, I’m reminded of how much I need them.
—Jennifer Berney, author of the memoir The Other Mothers.
The poems in Kathleen Byrd’s Last Resort leak outward, trilling the beard of an oyster — a litany of questions, a deluge of doubt, an unraveling of place and all that comes with it: colonized land, environmental collapse, and an unknowable future. Byrd writes with tender and elegiac urgency, with “restless waters on my tongue.” Full of visceral imagery, formal invention, tonal shifts, and fluid emotionality, Last Resort tends to place and familial history through nonlinear time — from a snake moving into a cold river to Byrd’s Oma: “back stitch / to something lost / a lineage.” These poems are truly marvelous; they ask us to slow down, ever so slowly, so that we may hear each syllable, each creature’s “humble grinding of grit.”
—Jane Wong, author of the poetry collections How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, Overpour, and the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City.