poems and other disasters
Ms. Triedman's first collection -- bathe in it or sleep, winner of the 2008 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition -- will be published in October 2008.
"Winner of the 2008 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest, bathe in it or sleep is an exceptionally fine book that gets it right from page one. The tone is hard-edged in the same way a sharpened blade is precise….Triedman has honed simplicity, the simplicity of directness freighted with the shadow of foreboding, of prescience…The poet has the ability, the gift, or transmuting the common object into exquisite metaphor…If I have a single complaint, it is that I want even more of Kim Triedman’s poems to read. I look forward to all that will follow this first chapbook." - Helen Marie Casey
Advance praise for bathe in it or sleep:
"In this beautiful and accomplished first collection, Kim Triedman writes movingly of being a child, a mother, a lover, a daughter, but most of all of being a person with a body in a world of intense experiences, experienced in the body and in the intensity of language itself. These are stunning and often breathtaking poems. I can’t wait to read more!"
- Nadia Herman Colburn
"Nature is a shaping presence in Kim Triedman's poems of self and family--poems with the tensile strength and delicacy of a spider web. The season at the heart of them is winter: "chill-choked;/ knife-blue sky sharpening/ its edge against/ the iron of the earth." Even indoors, the air is bright, etched, elemental. These revelatory poems discover beauty in the roughest terrain of love, of loss, of change--guided by the speaker's quiet, yet "insistent voice of the color of/ flame." - Cammy Thomas
"...Mostly, the point of view is through the post Wordsworthian "I” (or Eye), in its late American evolution...We cross the reading bar and this poet serves us straight shots of herself; we drink quickly and are deepened. For who would dispute that griefs are the deepest drafts of life, excepting one profane to name (and,of course, Art)...Triedman is a new poet from whom one wishes, as reviewers used actually to say, “to hear more.”
- P. Nelson
(excerpted from Fiddler Crab Review, April 27, 2009; for complete review, go to http://fiddlercrabreview.blogspot.com/)
(excerpted from The South Carolina Review, Spring 2010)
Purchase "bathe in it or sleep" at Main Street Rag
Choke-Holdbut winter:
howling,
chill-choked;
knife-blue sky sharpening
its edge against
the iron of the earth.
Every day an accusation,
even the trees:
branches like bones
pointing,
pewter shards of ice.
It’s a lot ofwork, this breathing
and breathing:
wind-wheezed;
eyes seamed against
the steel; red hands
weeping white. Air isless than air. Even
the cypresses
gasping,
drained of color; more
black than green.
Think of it this way:
Between the past and the future
stands a house. It’s tidy
and white, nearly ready
to explode. The terror, you see, the
weight of such a thing:
neither here nor there, like words,
withheld, or the hand
that meant to stroke.
Even in a strong wind leaves
can double-back, and
seagulls hang, frozen in sky.
We sit,
burning in silence:
eyes forward—
remembering nothing.
Once removed
your mind a bluish thing, twilit.
I have felt it, many times:
the squint of eyes, abstraction of hands,
the light of late afternoonladdering its way through
broken clouds; even the cormorants,
blacker than oil, hanging their wings
out to dry. The way youfollow a thought like a tune,
half-listening-half-dreaming, in and out
of time, plumbing its bluish depths.
Never mind: I am not meantto understand. The rocks are
black, the seaweed roils like
tangled dreadlocks in the foam;
the tonguing of the waves. Your facea blank.
