when if ever alive by Kelly Alsup

How good to find a poet that knows plants, knows animals, knows their habits, how they change through the seasons. Kelly Alsup is a terrific lyricist. Some poems sound classical, archaic, and I am taken by how much the world is breathing, stalking, basking, questioning, bathing, swallowing. Here are predators: cat, bobcat, otter, snake, man, woman. And prey: herring, robin’s egg, chicken, man, milkweed, woman. Right where life and physical love feed each other, the poems become “little scraps of gratitude.” Who could want more?

–Andrew Schelling, author of Tracks Along the Left Coast

Linnaeus formalized the system of language by which we identify the natural world. Today, I also have something of this drive: to categorize this rainy landscape of the neighborhood with its discordant mix of chickens, teenagers, and loud cars. But Kelly Alsup‘s when if ever alive redirects my attention to a different landscape—agrarian, Pacific, but also ancient and far away—that in its differences draws me closer to mine. I sense in each poem the energy of the eternal return, some quality that has always been combusting into existence, dampening, starting over again. Her language infuses the process with humor, joy, and sensuality. This is the unique gift of her poetry: to perform its philosophy with alliterative trill and a gentle shift in metaphor, as if we watch and hear something transform—the moon above the bay, the bobcat in its winter coat, the speaker herself. It follows that any poetry that reveals the eternal lining of the mutable world must also abandon hierarchy. These poems, like Linnaeus’s new names for the familiar, lead me to see differently my world—the modest houses and aggressive chickens, the speed of a girl skateboarding in the rain.

–J’Lyn Chapman, author of Beastlife