It Started with the Wild Horses by Ingrid Keriotis

Mother, spouse, teacher, citizen: it’s easy for life to pull us away from art, but Ingrid Keriotis reminds us we might be drawn toward it just as insistently.  Everywhere in her collection, It Started with the Wild Horses, we find a longing to stall time, so we might remember other selves we’ve left behind, or selves we’ve overlooked, so we might recall “what was good in the world,/and where it could be found.”  In both elegy and celebration, her acts of seeing are acts of empathy, broadcast in all directions.

 –Christopher Bakken, author of Eternity & Oranges

The poet voice of Ingrid Keriotis is full of a delicate passion for people, herself no more than the ones she knows well or only passes by, and the person behind that voice feels so vulnerable and exposed we feel protective of her, wandering around almost skinless as she seems.  Her view of the world is full of pain and wonder, and her images are fresh.  This is a poet whose voice is clearly growing stronger with each passing year, and in her most complete and powerful poems, poems like “Nighttime,” “Philadelphia, 1973,” “Puppies” and “Naptime,” she achieves a clear, lucid vision of a world below the everyday one, a world she opens up to our eyes.  This is a wonderful first book full of promise and compelling personal truth.

–Gail Entrekin, author of Rearrangement of the Invisible

In this collection, Ingrid Keriotis explores topics ranging from mother- and daughterhood to teacher, wife, traveler, and especially as a thinker in the wider world, and her poems take the reader to the most tender and sometimes achingly raw parts of the female experience. The poems offer up a world in which we are all a part of the difficult terrain. In her poem “Winter Night,” Keriotis writes, “Your own complicity comes to you/as dawn does—/arriving from so far away to stretch itself/across the tips of your eyelashes.” The world of these poems is not always an easy place, but it is a place where readers can find their own footing and where the beauty of these understated and deeply personal poems becomes quietly and complicitly universal.

–Gillian Wegener, This Sweet Haphazard (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017)