Somehow, here by Katherine Dizon

In Somehow, here, Katherine Dizon intertwines a journey of love and self-discovery across two pivotal periods: a transformative college poetry class which includes falling in love with both a classmate and poetry, and a decade later, as a married individual feeling lost and seeking identity. More than just love poems, Somehow, here is a wonderful ode to poetry itself and the intangible forces of creativity that remind us how sometimes when we are seeking something outside ourselves, we find it resided within us all along. Honest and vulnerable, this book speaks with a tender, thoughtful voice and considers the complexity of our memories. With lines like bursting into the briefest bloom, and I paint with that silence… / Every night, Northern Lights. Colors of what we could have been, Dizon engages in the lessons of loss, love, and longing but also in the beauty of what lies within the bright brilliant hues of self-discovery and awakening. Her words bring us deep in the heart of it all.

 —Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press)

The poems in Somehow, here are a sensory invitation to take a U-Turn, to time travel, and to resee what’s slipped past into the periphery. With clear-eyed attendance to memory, Kat Dizon asks: “How does the paleontologist know she’s touched the last bone?” Love is at stake in this collection – reconnecting with a first love and concurrently finding language for the desires that shape us. Which is to say, this is ultimately a daring and passionate collection of poems about seeking and finding the self: “All along it was me, firefly /of the west, faintly flashing, / barely visible in the dark.”

–Jenny Johnson, author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books)