Aurora Uteralis by Katie Mihalek

Katie Mihalek’s Aurora Uteralis folds scientific language into personal realization that results in poems that examine life through defamiliarized images. The speakers contemplate photosynthesis, the brain’s gyri and sulci, feather boas, plasma as vaginal fluid, and even chameleon melanophores while launching into the feminine. Enter these poems for unexpected and exhilarating turns. Enter these poems and the world will start to shift around you.

–Rajiv Mohabir, author of Whale Aria

The poems of Katie Mihalek’s collection, Aurora Uteralis, are marvels of profound embodiment and visionary attention. In “Jonah,” for example, a child finds herself in “the belly” of a department store clothes rack and, cradled there, comes to discover “what worship looks like” in the body of that vital “layering.” In another poem, a similar layering reveals itself inside the brain where “trees / layer over synapse edges.” These “layerings” are the inlays of metaphor, as in the title poem where the speaker awakens to an awareness of the cosmic correspondence within her own body, its plasma making her think of the “gaseous galaxies / and burning serenity held” inside her. Mihalek identifies these layers and correspondences with a topographer’s concentration on detail, a scientist’s inquisitiveness and, above all, with a poet’s formal sensitivity and imaginative breadth. What an excellent debut.

–Daniel Tobin, author of The Mansions