Any Gesture

Whitney Koo deftly expands the gestural vocabulary of what the book can do. In Any Gesture, we find lyrics that voice the drama between the speaker and their suicidal sister, “Ophelia.” Here, we find a masterclass in the pre-elegy and elegies for miscarriage. Here, we encounter a book-length poem that extends from the poet toward the reader. How does Whitney Koo simultaneously invest the lyric with moments of rapture, dimension, and devastation while simultaneously interrogating the act of lyric performance? Answer: Wizardry. Koo never takes shortcuts, always remains patient with the poem to allow surprise to reign, even when uncomfortable. What results is a book I keep close at hand and a poet who vitally reminds us that magic emerges by embracing the work poetry asks of us. As she writes: “I’ve tried the line many times / with no answer.”

— Rushi Vyas, author of When I Reach For Your Pulse

In Any Gesture, Whitney Koo uses different poetic forms like shifting variables in an experiment to stimulate that atrophied sense with which, as Rilke posits in his letters to the young poet, we may once have been able to live in communication with death. She writes as if feeling out that neglected muscle for even one living nerve ending, and, astonished, seems to find one, where death can “rush violently through.” In these elegies, death feels wild and active, like something just born. It is hungry, it is nearby, it starts to ring in the night like a telephone. (Could be anyone calling.) “The phone ringing in the night the most terrible sound,” but the poems never hesitate to pick up.

–Courtney Bush, author of I Love Information

Whitney Koo, in her debut collection of poetry, Any Gesture, presents us with a new and urgent lexicon for describing grief—anticipatory grief for a troubled sister, ritualized grief for a miscarriage, postponed grief from a teenage encounter with a suicide. Haunted by death, the speaker is “a picnic blanket picked up by the wind and blown against a tree trunk,” calls out I love you as if into a black hole, a “tablecloth pulled through the O of two fingers. Part pushing silence’s coin bag inside out.” An elegy can be described as an act of mourning, part remembrance, part violent objection. These elegies and “pre-elegies” do so in startling and exquisite language; they also function as a means of protection, spells that might avert the worst that can happen, the keyboard, as Koo writes, “all you have to widen a ledge with.”

–Melissa Kwasny, author of Cloud Path