COSMOGRAPHIES is Kyle Harvey's first collection of poetry!
Making the poem, I simply look for a way in. Tucked between the pages, I find a small piece of paper with handwriting that reads: 'To receive a boring gift, look under Michael's bed.' And I'm in. In this place, even nothingness is not. Anything might happen, and it probably will. I light myself up to light my way in the dark.There, or here rather, I'm taking notes, fully aware of the ghosts, which are everyday domestic things. Beautiful and embarrassing. Slow exposures under safe lights. Sometimes these glimpses fold themselves into me, new patterns from old habits.
A humility born of contemplation of the cosmos underwrites the poems of Kyle Harvey's COSMOGRAPHIES, radiating outward from the poet's I to the furthest reaches of the universe. Literary time falls away and history too and place as only local, and one is where one is, which is here, in geological space/time, Denver Nuggets notwithstanding. It would almost be prayer if it weren't too much poem. The visionary still puts in the work, weighing and measuring his materials with a careful hand. A mountain MallarmÈ withdrawing volumes from adjacent book cliffs, Harvey has built a refuge from the transactional chaos of an illyrical world, a cool place to inhabit.-- Garrett Caples
It's always been the matter with poetry posing the question asking the answer putting the next opener and shaper Kyle Harvey lets those hidden corners show a flash in the dense a wink to a world dancing substances moving poems.--Clark Coolidge
Kyle Harvey's COSMOGRAPHIES is a fearless book. In the eponymous opening section he really does take on the origins of time and space, mind and language; he then goes on in The Alphabet That Never Recovers to channel early humans' experiences of language, thought, and spirituality; and finally in Western Suites, gets personal, if you can say that such free-swinging and wide open language is ever exactly personal in any usual sense. 'poems/go, taking/with them only/what we let go of./Whole oceans of meaning/revealed./ Don't ask me/what I mean/Don't tell me/what you mean./ Meaning/is the murder/ of process.' Indeed!-- Norman Fischer, author of There Was a Clattering As..., Nature, and Selected Poems 1980-2013
Poetry.
