- Kim Roberts
Reviews
This promising first book offers an eccentric commentary on love, sex and family. Roberts has a dexterous poetic
voice, one that either tells a story or, better yet, disappears behind the story, allowing you to enter it. Roberts
also has a keen ability to spot the perfect metaphor...Roberts lets her cadenced poetic voice carry the poem,
allowing it to find its own language and story line. These poems comprise the lucky side of the wishbone.
—Publishers' Weekly, June 1994
This uncommonly original and spirited book of poems is as bountiful as the universe itself. It is divided into
three diverse sections, each of which bristles with a kind of glorious energy...There is a delightfully subversive
list quality to the poems 'Imagine This' and 'Darwin in Reverse,' like layers being delicately but deliberately
peeled away. The mother in 'Mother' is a female horseshoe crab and a sharp metaphor at that. While the daughter in
'Daughter' comes face to face with the real father who failed her and the dream father she created on the page...All
in all, this book is an astronomical debut. Next time you look up at the stars, the one shining brightest might be a
poet named Kim Roberts.
—Letter Ex: Chicago's Poetry Newsmagazine, December 1994
The passionate, sardonic voice in these poems is that of a woman who boldly roams the universe and offers us
meditations on love, sex, and the gritty mysteries of being female. The poems shimmer with the “ashen light of
Venus.” The woman in them lives in moonlight, starlight, and the deep blackness of space.
—Minnie Bruce Pratt
Beneath the stars Kim Roberts has created a beautiful collection of poems. Her first book, The Wishbone Galaxy, is
like a first kiss —memorable. Some of the poems explore the female presence in nature, others reflect the
intellect one associates with genius.
—E. Ethelbert Miller
The Wishbone Galaxy is one of the best first books in my lifetime. I admire these poems tenacious tactile
qualities, their skillfully concealed craft, their density and intensity. Moving, passionate, insightful, these
wonderful evocatios of Eros should be appreciated by anyone interested — and who isn’t — in
“the pressure of one body against another. These brilliant poems offer a constellation of pleasures.
—Bill Knott
Kim Roberts
Kim Roberts is the editor of Beltway: An On-Line Poetry Quarterly. In addition to The Wishbone Galaxy, individual poems of hers are also included in numerous anthologies, such as American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon), Hungry As We Are (Washington Writers Publishing House), and The First Yes: Poems About Communicating (Dryad Press). She has published widely in literary journals throughout the US, as well as in Canada, Ireland, France, and Brazil.
Roberts has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission for the Arts, the DC Humanities Council, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She has been awarded writers' residencies at New York Mills Arts Retreat, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Mesa Refuge, Ragdale Foundation, Ucross Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, the Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Poems from The Wishbone Galaxy
How to Imagine Deafness
Darken your ears until the tunnels
with their intricate clockwork
are sheathed in pitchy calm.
Hum a little blue, to yourself,
but keep it secret. The small bones
will dip delicately, like willow leaves
that merely brush the water's surface,
in their repose. The small hairs
will lay down together like tentacles.
Listen: the lake stops its lapping
repetition of sibilance
(physicist, Sisyphus, sassafras)
and the great snail unfurls itself,
stretches its tongue longingly
toward the distant echo surge
that must be the heart.
Readings by the Author
Imagine This [1:16]
The Plastic Cup [1:40]
If you cannot play these audio files, download the free Quicktime Player from Apple.