Once Read as Ruin by Katherine Gaffney – NWVS #163

In Once Read as Ruin, Katherine Gaffney brilliantly weds the apocalyptic and domestic.  Thrumming with an electric pulse, these poems tap the latent energies—the longing, the fury, the wildness—wired beneath the surface of the everyday.  Here, mutilated bodies and rotting beds figure a kind of domestic death-drive through which Gaffney’s speaker—impossibly, profoundly—seeks a radical aliveness.  Channeling Plath, but never reducible to imitation or stereotype, Gaffney limns interior cartographies wonderfully vital in their complexity, at once intimate and feral, animate and arrested.  “I’d rather / bleed forever,” Gaffney writes, “sign / my life away with / a needle, sewn shut / without possibility / for undoing.”  It is a haunting image, and one which testifies to the lush austerity—and the maturity and command and care—of a voice which will continue to resound in American poetry.  Once Read as Ruin is a powerful first flexing of that voice.