Amy Kesegich, Ph.D. has published poetry in Rawhead, The Connecticut River Review, The Comstock Review, Blue Mountain Review, Penguin Review, Heights Observer, Poetography, Rubbertop Review, White Pelican Review, California Quarterly, Frost Notes, Poetry Motel, and Whiskey Island Magazine. She has a chapbook, Spare Change, published by Bits Press. Her manuscript, The House Witch, was a finalist for the 2024 St. Lawrence Book Award and she has received Honorable Mention in the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest. She lives in Fairport Harbor, Ohio with her husband. Some Complaints About Time is her first full-length poetry collection. @akesegich
PRAISE:
Early in this book, Kesegich establishes her dual vision: “No one tells the beach/ how a bright Icarus afternoon/ can drop, forgotten,/ into the black water of night.” Kesegich is clear sighted in that bright afternoon, detailing the minutiae of the natural world: ”mothers last just long enough/ to string a curtain of pearls,/ a weeping willow of eggs.” But she is more than aware of the night–the monstrous, the grotesque, the witch/monster who is also the self. Her poems act like the machine in The Fly: “the scientist hops in the box,/ mixes his molecules . . . . types a note with his one human hand.” But not to worry. Like Grendel’s mother, we can still thrive as “warrior women [who] grind our canines/ and tighten our haunches to pounce.”
–Susan Grimm, author of Lake Erie Blu
Kesegich is constantly recalibrating her relation to her subjects – observer, companion, adversary. Her language is vivid, sometimes startling. She’s bewitched by trees, insects, horror movies, interiors: the eye she turns on them is incisive, but also hopeful: “I might as well let the world in,” she says, “one tarnished teaspoon at a time.” Ghosts drift through this collection – ghost cat, ghost parents – and they receive the same attention as the squirrel and the cicada: they’re welcome, recalled by an abandoned pot of tea, “undimmed by the flickering light of home movies.”
–Mary Grimm, author of Left to Themselves and Transubstantiation
If only all “complaints” could be so full of wit, lively language, and wonder. Amy Kesegich’s poems remind us that time taketh away, but also that time gives us everything we have to lose: the old cat “whose shadow I miss/coming around the corner”; the old car that “carried us ‘Just Married,’ squinting in the March sun”; even an everyday orange, which “gives me a mind of marigolds and Mars.” Kesegich’s imagination ranges from the sneeze “on the cosmic dandelion,/seeding the sky with stars” to “the small laugh of a man alone with a book/smuggling the universe into a corner.” I imagine that man is reading these delightful, illuminating poems.
–Lynn Powell, author of The Zones of Paradise and Season of the Second Thought
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