Possessing Yourself, Poems by Tim Kahl
The discursive poems of Tim Kahl's Possessing Yourself display an always-inquisitive, even restless intellect intent on bringing as wide a range of thought and experience and ideas as possible into its purview. Yet thought never excludes feeling: "...I am some species of naturalist, measuring loss/by paying close attention to all the buried vestiges."
"Part photo album, part diagram, part dream, Tim Kahl's Possessing Yourself hacks a life out of the harsh terrain of experience. Here the poet shares with us the things that charge his emotions, his imagination, his self. That he does it without solipsism is a marvel; that he does it with honesty is a gift. In vivid narrative and acute lyric, these poems bring us close to the complexities of a whole human being. This is an exceptional book." --Joshua McKinney
"As the author floats up into his marvelous dream of animals, the dark hand of history seizes his ankle and holds him. He is in hallucinatory agony, like the tethered Marcello Mastroianni at the beginning of Fellini's 8 1/2, and it propels us into the whole story: how to possess a life. There is the ghost of a pet dog, a hummingbird, cattle at a fair, a dead duck, a flirtatious moth. They are all intimations of a transcendent world we hardly dared hope for. Martin Luther and his minions--friends and family, both living and dead--press in at the edges, but the wonder remains. Kahl's Possessing Yourself never stops amazing us."--Lawrence R. Smith
Tim Kahl’s work has been published in Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Caliban, Connecticut Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review, Illuminations, Indiana Review, The Journal, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon West Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He has translated German poet Rolf Haufs, Austrian avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker; Brazilian poets, Lêdo Ivo and Marly de Oliveira; and the poems of the Portuguese language’s only Nobel Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup (http://www.greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com) Additionally, he is also the editor for Bald Trickster Press (http://www.baldtricksterpress.com). He can also be found online at http://www.timkahl.com.
ISBN 978-1934999585, 100 pages, $18.00