BOOK, REVIEWS
GROUND WORK
Reviews:
Casey Knott knows there is another world inside of this one. Her poems enact those moments when the world discloses itself and, not coincidentally, when some layer of self-protection also comes loose. Breaking, mending, moving on. In the manner of animals and birds. In the manner of earth. There is a magnificent patience behind this work. —Richard Robbins, author of Body Turn to Rain: New and Selected Poems
Ground Work by Casey Knott traces a beautiful path of inquiry into what it means to be alive. It does not pretend to have the answers, but offers a “ticking chest” “to everything named or unnamed / right there in the backyard.” This is the compass, in case we got lost. These poems urge us to connect to ourselves through the observation of the quotidian. Knott looks at “the details / that assume a life” and imbues this life with more meaningful ones. Ground Work allows us to be privy to a conversation with nature that tells us more about ourselves than we realized we did not know. Knott encourages us to not be afraid, and invites us to “Go in now. // Want this.” — Laura Cesarco Eglin, author of Occasions to Call Miracles Appropriate and Calling Water by Its Name
Ground Work, she calls it, but Casey Knott often ushers us into her cunning and wide-wheeling perceptions on the back of a hawk or owl or crow, some predator seeking sustenance in the confusion below: "noise and beastly, invasive / and weedy.” Likewise potent are the other celestial phenomena, moon, stars, storm clouds, and when this Conjure Woman hangs “wet sheets on a clothesline,” she can “step back and watch air craft a life / for them.” Everywhere these poems churn up fertility and desire, "an idea / attached to my chest trying to claw its way out.” In so doing they reinvigorate what looks like ravaged America; they celebrate its weed-grown lanes, its shacks in collapse. When an artist's so alert as this, so wonderstruck, even a strip of sun through a broken blind can set her on a quest, her “skin an unexpected / welcome shiver, as if a tiger / flexed around her bones.” --John Domini, author of The Color Inside a Melon