Water Shedding by Beth Konkoski

“One storm crouches behind another,” Beth Konkoski warns us—there’s always menace ahead, whether you’re an eleven-year-old riding her bike at night or a woman trying to transform tense family dinners into harmony. The compensation for worry is beautifully observed detail: a “bristly symphony of pine needles” or bedding that “opens like a tulip.” Unravel an evening with Water Shedding to recall the pleasures of your own fearlessness, heightened by adult recognition of its dangers.

–Lesley Wheeler, author of Radioland

Beth Konkoski is a poet who weighs her words. In these short, direct poems that pulse with emotion, Konkoski measures out language, imagery, and music with delicate economy, as in these lines from “Aubade”: “Once my legs might have wound / like sapling roots around yours, / our radar senses seeking / just the breath of distance.” Thematically, too, these poems concern themselves with balance and also with the lack of it: while a daughter practices her routine on the balance beam, life hurtles past, causing marriages to unravel and families to shatter. Duty and responsibility becloud these poems like thunderstorms that sometimes roll in one after another, repeatedly drenching those who walk out unprepared. Konkoski has an eye for finely chosen detail: a smudge on a hand-drawn portrait, the husk of a puffball mushroom, “a pause uncommon / but pure as a crocus.” In short: Konkoski is a poet to watch and savor.

–Katherine E. Young, author of Day of the Border Guards, Poet Laureate, Arlington, VA (2016-2018)

With the multiple meanings of her title, Water Shedding, Beth Konkoski prepares us for the rich tensions present in this book. Sensual, muscular, informed too by her life as a mother, daughter, wife, these poems are the hard-won results of the poet’s hard-won moments of “serenity.” The ability to “[sit] still and [listen] / for the pulse of glaciers and calm, / seeping teabags, / the call of tree frogs / and afternoon pink.” From fairy-tale archetypes to family struggles, Konkoski gives us moments of clarity amidst the confusion, “an orchid / rimmed in gold, blossoms / of the plum arranged / on a moon-lit pool,” a new appreciation for “the circles / both worn and splintered.”

–Moira Egan, author of Synæsthesium: