TEMPLE | poems by Kristen Case

By mieladmin / On / In Books, Publishing

TEMPLE poems Kristen Case MIEL 2014So pleased to bring this chapbook, which came to us in our 2013 reading period, to the world. Kristen Case’s poems were an incredible gift. These were poems I read and had to stop and set down and then pick up again right away to see whether they really were that good, whether someone had sent something so perfect for our press to us, whether indeed the coincidences of the universe had aligned in such a way. They had. I got to see Kristen read last summer and her poems spoken are as wry and taut and transparent, as structural and as supple-brittle, as they are on the page. She writes in the union-space of thinking and embodiment that I admire and thrill to in the work of writers like Anne Carson and Anne Boyer. Temple is an incredibly beautiful collection of poems; they resist ease, they resist supplied answers. In doing so, they told me much about the possibility of the world, the relation of the writer and the woman to the world, the way we map our interior selves onto the places where we end up. (This book would, by the way, make a perfect Mother’s Day present, and even more so paired with Shana Youngdahl’s winter/windows.)

The chapbook itself is something special—Tom Jessen, who runs Foxglove Press and is Kristen’s husband, printed our covers on his Chandler & Price platen press. The design (by MIEL) is a stylized map of Temple, Maine; throughout the book there are map markings (like the arrow, above, which is on the title page). Besides an edition of ninety copies of Temple in their letterpress covers, there are a further fifty which, around those covers, wear a jacket made from a reproduction 19th-century map of the area. The publication date is in late April, but we’ve opened up pre-orders already.

A few copies are available for review; please be in touch (miel.books at gmail) if you would like to write about this book.