Kathryn Kysar

From the shores of Dark Lake in northern Minnesota, poet Kathryn Kysar’s first book explores lakes and prairies, gender and relationships, bodies and water, travel and home. Vivid and imagistic, Kysar’s fresh, honest poems dive into contemplative waters and resurface glimmering with clarity.
Kathryn Kysar's first poetry collection tastes of the great dark lake of earth, of roots grown in black loam and pulled up to nourish the particular hunger women have for just a bit of grit. Kysar explores the human appetite for image, sensation and scent in an intimate voice that makes the collection entreat, whisper, gossip and confide.  In the end, readers comes to know Dark Lake as they would a friend.
--
Heid Erdrich, author of Fishing for Myth and editor of Sister Nation

Kathryn Kysar makes clear how many worlds women see, how many possibilities they give up, how much they reach for, how sharp their view is of our life, how many things they want, and what they do about it.
-- Robert Bly, author of Eating the Honey of Words and Silence on the Snowy Fields

I dived into Dark Lake and hoped I'd never have to come up. Kysar’s  language is sensuous, witty, and deeply enjoyable and she has a generous range of feeling. In a voice that is both experienced and innocent she lets us hear a groupie's intimate thoughts, a fisher's reverie, or the earth itself forgiving its creatures. Her illusions can be classical or homely; she wears her learning, like her wide travels, lightly. She writes with an earthy appetite for the concrete world of flesh and fluid, animals and vegetables, and also with an apprentice mystic's longing for the stars.
-- Martha Roth, author of Arousal:  Bodies and Pleasures and editor of Transforming a Rape Culture and Mother Journeys:  Feminists Write About Mothering

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once wrote. And Kathryn Kysar’s poems are a shining example of such stories.  Rich with her totems: the mother, the pregnant wife, the coyote, the man, the potato—they sing of invention, the need to tell it out, the need to make life, the wit it takes to nourish it.  Here is a voice we can trust
.-- Robert Dana, author of Summer, What I Think I Know: New and Selected Poems, and Yes, Everything.