The Alphabet Not Unlike the World

A deeply confident, compelling voice.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

Katrina Vandenberg recognizes the alphabet as a site where the global and the local join, where history becomes the present moment, where history has moment, is momentous. In these poems, ‘seeing is not the same / asseeing through,’ but both occur, guided by the double recognition of the alphabet as both medium and message. These poems live near enough to ‘the house of the unsaid’ that when in one of them the first person invests the second to ‘tell me if you want me to stop,’ a reader may say, as I did out loud, Not yet. Please, not yet.

— H.L. Hix

A stranger pays your bar tab out of pity; the inmate — seeking approval — changes his tune year after year; a saint stands still enough for birds to nest in his hand: these poems take us to the profane, to shed light on the tenuous sacred. Vandenberg’s prosodic gift takes us to the breezy edge of the line. In traditional forms like the ghazal, witty alphabet poems, and cyclonic free verse she reminds us that truth already is slant, ‘Hell is holding onto a secret, some of us already know.’

— Kristin Naca

I had meant to read a few poems, then return to the book another time. Two hours later I put it down, shaken and exhilarated. It careens between heartbreak and breakthrough in ways that began by amazing me and finished by moving me to the point where I had no choice but to agree when Vandenberg writes in the book’s last poem, ‘You can’t, in the end / close the book.’

— Jim Moore

Vandenberg fills her hands with the world and offers it to us in a gleaming, dripping plenty: a love letter to letters, an omnibus inventory of signs, symbols, and gestures, a guileless gift of all the things she loves, knows, and feels.

— Todd Boss