Never Mind

In Never Mind, Katherine Lawrence constructs a centuries-old immigrant tale that is fiercely feminist, surprisingly modern, and darkly funny. The voice in these exquisite poems is a 19th century woman who straddles both old and new worlds as she navigates her own interior landscape. Observations are wry, intimate, and shot with musicality. This muscular collection pays tribute to the long poem while extending the tradition with fragments from letters, diary entries, sketches, dialogue, and an ongoing communion with the natural world. "Who knocks?" asks Wife in Never Mind. "Maple leaves reddened with gossip -- Come in." New star in the longpoem sky, Never Mind by Katherine Lawrence gets cunning on page 5 and stays that way, throwing open the shutters of self, family, history, nation. Its language settles toward, while reaching free of, a narrative we expect but have not seen quite this way. Its open forms give but don't give in. We'll be grateful for this book. --Gerald Hill, author of Hillsdale Book Layered, distinctive, and adventurous, Katherine Lawrence's Never Mind seems set in the past but vaults into a future poetic. At once ethereal and concrete, her words, through erasure and oblique reference, invite engagement and speculation. They make you mind. --Steven Ross Smith, author of Emanations: Fluttertongue 6 Lyricism and beauty, loss and awe, horror and grief--these poems comprise an unflinching portrait of a woman (and artist) who spends a lifetime asking herself: "What brought me here?" --Patricia Young, author of Night-Eater and An Auto-erotic History of Swings