The Narcoleptic Yard

“Here is raw American religion, family romance gone bad, and the violence of individual consciousness. Here is a fearless new poet whose vision and language create fragments that are really shards sharp enough to cut through the lies of everyday life and draw blood. A rabbit’s ribcage she calls “a nest of umbrellas / swung upward.” Brittle and edgy, almost fragile, these poems are nonetheless willfully, skillfully gorgeous. Their stark articulations glance like locusts-the Biblical name Ketz calls cicadas-or bullets off the things of this earth.”

-Julia Spicher Kasdorf

“In her brilliant first book, Charity Ketz writes tumultuous truths. Mystical in its delicacy yet scientific in its exactitude, The Narcoleptic Yard replicates the ineffable, gives it a location and a name, even as it acknowledges the mundane or punishing aspects of materiality. With passionate honesty, Charity Ketz infuses family dynamics with a quiddity equal to their complexity. Her powerful poems encounter cruelty and suffering with a ferocious subtlety, an unsparing intelligence that is devoid of sentimentality yet full of feeling. There’s nothing facile, nothing glib. Who knew that domestic life held such shimmering reserves?”

-Alice Fulton

“Halfway through the book the poet asks, ‘Do I have to mean everything I say?’ The answer’s never given but The Narcoleptic Yard rises, again and again, to the occasions of the question. These poems-of snow, the ache for wholeness and ‘what will be enough,’ of thought and talking and the facts of luck-both document and complicate ways of meaning. This is unsettling work
and gorgeous work as well.”

-C.S. Giscombe