Double Take by Paloma Yannakakis

“Paloma Yannakakis’s poems grant me access to a distinctive realm of experience, which I have found nowhere else.  As my foot falters over a cloud or a doubt, my hand is placed on the warm, solid flank of an animal. In the carefully chosen words of Double Take, meditations acquire the value of stones against which the flow of time becomes newly palpable. These stones mark the gravity of the particular life, which needs to be registered. Even in its exploration of disorientation and doubt, this collection remains firm in its conviction that there need to be poems. We need language to dematerialize the world as we know it, but we need those same words to be stones. Reading this collection has made me think that is what a poem is.”

–Amanda Auerbach, author of What Need Have We For Such As We (C& R Press, 2019)

“In Double Take, Paloma Yannakakis leads her poetry to endure the limits of exploration that is possible with our human language. What seems like a simple stroll through a landscape, or an observation of an insect performing its natural behaviors, leads to tantalizing new awareness of our consciousness for both the speaker and her readers: we hear a beating heart in these lines that calls us to take a look again and see the other dimension of reality, disturbed into being by our mere presence in this world.”

–Jack Jung, translator of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020)