Q: We devoured your beautiful poetry collection, Creature (Jacar Press, 2025). Would you speak to how “insistence and wonder” I play a part in your poetic practice?
A: These two words—insistence and wonder—speak to the paradox of making poems. There's got to be a willfulness involved in showing up to the blank page or the page with scattered lines and notes for a poem. I have to be insistent about that time and space. If I'm not, if I let the business of life's obligations take over, then there's an emotional and physical insistence that arises. I feel heavy and a bit out of focus. Because I know that when I'm faithful to my practice, I have so much more access to a state of wonder, when what's offered by experience is so rich, I can't stay outside my practice for long. Or, if I do, I'm simply unhappy. The wonder for me is having access to other dimensions of life and reality--I start to recognize synchronistic events unfolding across the day, insights I wasn't making space and time for otherwise. Yet it takes courage to show up consistently, insistently (!) for that dynamic dimension of life. It both provides a grounding and a need for a grounding--wonder can sweep you away, take you outside time--and I still have to pay the bills. Perhaps that's why the monastic orders provide such ritualized structures to hold an intensely spiritual life and its wondrous dimensions. (I'm writing now as the new Pope is being chosen!)
About Creature: Poems:
What does it mean to be a person in relation to others, both human and animal? Rife with observations of the natural and manmade worlds, Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick is a garden of awareness and grief, insistence and wonder. In this full-length collection, Kirkpatrick blends a clarity of vision with a close attention to form, metaphor, and the nuances of language. These are poems rooted in landscape and memory, about mothers and daughters, love and mourning, and the harrowing context in which we now find ourselves living. Creature offers a poetry of paying attention and of being in the world, ultimately revealing that what is most human about us is what is most creaturely, and how we are all ultimately “tossed in the vastness.” Natalie Eleanor Patterson, Editor’s Choice Award.
About Kathryn Kirkpatrick:
Kathryn Kirkpatrick is Professor of English at Appalachian State University where she teaches environmental literature, animal studies, and Irish studies from an ecofeminist perspective and where she co-directs the animal studies minor, a multidisciplinary program she helped to found. Kirkpatrick has published essays on class trauma, eco-feminist poetics, and animal studies, focusing particularly on the work of Dublin poet Paula Meehan. Her monograph on Meehan’s work, Enraptured Space, is from West Virginia University Press (2025). She is co-editor of Animals in Irish Literature and Culture (2015), which includes her essay on the representation of foxes in Somerville and Ross’s Irish PM stories. As well as a scholar and editor, Kirkpatrick is the author of eight collections of poetry, including three recipients of the NC Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell award, The Body’s Horizon (1996), Our Held Animal Breath (2012), and Her Small Hands Were Not Beautiful (2014). The Fisher Queen: New & Selected Poems (Salmon, 2019) received the NC Literary and Historical Society’s Roanoke Chowan Poetry Prize. Creature was published by Jacar Press in 2025.