BETWEEN by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews (NWVS #141)

Between is a delicate work of durable noticing. Kimberly Quiogue Andrews has made her poems out of all poetic things and those things rumored to be resistant to poetry, and has proven, with these poems, that our species has not yet satisfied its need for thoughts on the sky.

–Anne Boyer, author of Garments Against Women

In Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’s Between, the reader immediately veers into a slanted world of trapezoidal shards of light, where “I leave you” means “I love you,” where “clarity is not a remedy for suffering.” Andrews’s remarkable gift for creating a space of both forceful intelligence and equal tenderness is evident throughout the collection. Whether we are reading her poems about the seemingly mundane task of helping a lover clean out a garage or more expansive, philosophical reflections on language and gender, Between is a truly remarkable collection.

–Sandra Simonds, author of Warsaw Bikini and Further Problems with Pleasure

 Have you ever spoken a familiar word over and over until it turns strange, unsticks from its known meaning, and dissembles into new possibility? That’s how I feel when I read Between. The ancient obsessions that bind these poems—language, relation, gender, embodiment—are reconstituted under Andrews’ pen. It’s true, there are “too many birds in too many poems.” But these poems chart other lines of flight. Look at the surprising harvest Andrews’ attention yields. A marketplace emerges from the woven wool of a rug. Meditations on togetherness unfold from the knickknacks forgotten in pockets. Between holds me in the space of that ever-crucial question: How else might we be?

–Claire Schwartz, author of Bound