Undressing the World by Kathy Kremins

Even though the penultimate poem swears that it’s not about Newark, Parents, Religion, or Longing, each poem in this collection gets to the heart of one child’s experience of the profound and lasting impact of Vatican II and Vietnam, of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. and in Ireland. With evocative detail Kremins revisits the clashing of national and international politics with family values, joys, and traumas. Undressing the World removes layers of convention and silence to reveal a child who is both living innocently with her heroes “in a Technicolor imagination” and also living with the hard earned wisdom that even “Casper couldn’t rescue my eyes.” These poems are full of the hands that do the undressing: hands praying, hands working, hands caressing, hands harming: “Those hands, eighty seven years of history imprinted on callused / fingertips and broad palms…”  In this collection, rich in poetic form and specific cultural and historical images, Kremins takes our hands and invites us to explore identity and loss and the body and tragedy, war and peace, and love and hope in all their variations.

–Lynne McEniry, author of some other wet landscape

When was the last time you heard a good love song? Kat Kremins’ Undressing the World is full of them, tough and tender lyrics about the hard truths of personal and collective histories: a childhood whose “Technicolor imagination” is “interrupted or canceled” by the Kennedy assassination, “the blood taste of Vietnam,” the struggle for Civil Rights, a world undressed in a working class Irish immigrant Newark where a “dark green Oldsmobile” won in a church raffle is “a sign of wealth we didn’t have.” Kremins is a bard of the body as both “myth [and] narrative we are given as children” and “Republic,” and reminds us that history is not a dead abstraction but a constant living presence urging us to attain the kind of love that “needs no words.”

—PaulA Neves, author of capricornucopia (the dream of the goats), winner of the 2020 NJ Poets Prize, co-founder Parkway North Productions.

Undressing the World by Kathy Kremins is awe, experience, love, grief, joy, acceptance, and memory in one exhale. With the backdrop of a Newark, NJ in historical transition, Kremins’ poems are technicolor hymns and elegies collectively displaying an ode to a life lived, living, and still learning where Undressing the World is not only the unpacking and reckoning of memory, but is a created space for the speaker to see “my face/ The map it is, lines of/ Every touch, tenderness.”

–Dimitri Reyes, author of Every First & Fifteenth