Description
Any Closer to Home
by Katie Daley
Paper
$17.99
979-8-88838-382-7
2023
Any Closer to Home is a song of bewilderment, a body searching Earth for the beat beneath the turmoil so it can dance nevertheless. There’s a jig for blistered fists, a naked waltz in a laundromat, and a blues lullaby for the end of the world. Migrants sweep the front stoop of Jupiter as mountainsides go up in flames. A donkey bellows, an apple falls, a bruise is swallowed. A long-distance driver pulls off the highway to kneel in a field of fireflies. She wants us to recognize the invitation. She wants us to consider the possibility that for all we know, she or any of us could be kneeling in the stars.
Katie Daley is a recipient of three Individual Creativity Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her work has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Keepthings, Exposition Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Art Crimes, Seneca Review, and After the Bell: Contemporary American Prose about School (University of Iowa Press). As a teaching artist, she does therapeutic writing outreach in drug rehabilitation programs, hospitals, schools and community centers throughout Northeast Ohio. Of all the occupations in the cosmos, she’s chosen to be a poet because it’s the one that makes her feel the most present and alive. It’s her hope that the poems she writes make that feeling as contagious as possible. www.katiedaley.com
RC Wilson (verified owner) –
“ANY CLOSER TO HOME,” by Katie Daley (2023, Finishing Line Press, Georgetown Ky, http://www.finishinglinepress.com)
Katie Daley is a performing poet who also writes for publication. A lot of writers work the other way around, writing for the page and reading aloud mostly when launching a new book. Katie has mesmerized audiences all over the country, but that does not make this book any less special. Just be aware that these poems were written to be spoken, almost sung. I suggest you find a good place to read them out loud, like incantations or spells. Take this book down in a tunnel, or out to the middle of a bridge, and speak her poems. Or better yet, borrowing an image from two of these poems, if you have access to an old grand piano, take a few blankets and make a nest for yourself under there and speak the poems, letting her words resonate with the taut wire harp above you. Just kidding. Read them anyway you want to but read them.
The book sort-of invites you to sing along. The first poem is titled “Artists’ Lullaby”, followed by quotes from Muddy Waters and Henry James. That unique pairing kind of announces the poet’s playful nature. It is a beautiful love poem with the poetic voice addressing the artist lover on “the last day on earth.” The images are synaesthetic, commingling vision and hearing into a single soothing sense. Daley is one of those ecstatic poets, who work the border between the ordinary and the miraculous. Her poems plead and extol for us to see the magic all around us hiding in plain sight. In her poem, “Homecoming,” she begins with:
What do you call it, at dusk, after a long day’s drive,
when you hurry your suitcase through the rain
and are pulled up short by thousands of fireflies in the yard,
gliding like gondolas among the glimmering drops?
The poem uses the second person narration to make this OUR experience, and yes, we are all pulled up short by such moments. She goes on to spell out our obligation to live large and lean into it, to taste the sacred rain.
I love the individual poems, but also how well they are stitched together to make a coherent chapbook. We find ourselves dancing naked in the rain in one poem, and naked in a laundromat in another. A bottle of glue in the first poem is sought after in another poem. Living under a piano shows up as the beginning of one poem, and is echoed in another. Then there is the overall shape of the narrative, with defiant joy at the beginning and the end, all wrapped around a deep dive into grief and loss in the heart of the book. As I get older, poetry sometimes makes me cry. One of Katie’s poems set the record for me, and had me weeping two words into the first stanza, after a long title: “His Mother Still Speaks in the Present Tense When She Speaks of Him.” The first two words? “Tamir Rice…” This is a fine little book that expands greatly when you open it up.
RC Wilson, 11/29/2023
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