On Kirsten Ihns Throwing Voices
POLITICAL INSANITY and a global pandemic may continue to rule the land, but the massive Propeller Books publicity machine sweeps those distractions aside with a mighty wave of its hand and points instead toward something better: continued applause for sundaey, Kirsten Ihns’s debut poetry collection (and our first poetry title). If you need a break from worrying about the future, celebrate the present by looking in on some of these highlights from Caryl Pagel’s admiring review in Poetry Northwest of Ihns’s work:
One becomes immersed in Ihns’s lively, mischievous sounds, which reflect her poems’ desire to receive and throw voices from anywhere / everywhere (coding, architecture, photography, philosophy, paparazzi, etc.), creating a “specular erotics of construction…culture / the kind i can freely lounge inside of / kick my feet in feel so soundless.”
In addition to throwing voices, Pagel does a lovely job of describing how Ihns’s poems use language to open up an array of inspired conceptual spaces:
When Ihns shifts rapidly between different kinds, or depths of language, imaginative area is created; when the reader moves from interiority to abstraction to description to naming, they’re caught in a bounce between surface level reference and multifaceted, cavernous or metaphorical phrasing, all of which generate room.
Even better, Pagel also points out how Ihns’s work makes readers want to enter a social space, too. After reading the poems, you really want to talk about them:
One could have an enthusiastic conversation about sundaey’s relationship to other expansive, architecturally complicated work such as Rosbud Ben-Oni’s Turn Around Bright Xyxs, Shelley Feller’s Dream Boat, LaTasha N Navada Diggs’s TwERK, Candice Wuehle’s Death Industrial Complex, Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory trilogy, or Carrie Lorig’s The Book of Repulsive Women.
The mighty Propeller publishing machine stamping out copies of sundaey.
You don’t have to limit yourself to just these excerpts, though. The entirety of Pagel’s review is wonderfully descriptive and completely accurate (we feel) in its admiration for Ihns’s book.
Read Caryl Pagel’s full review of sundaey.
Order sundaey from Propeller Books (shipping is free).
Kirsten Ihns earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. She is currently a Ph.D. student and Neubauer Presidential Fellow in English at the University of Chicago, where she studies texts that seem to want to be images, co-founded the Plexiglas series at The Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, co-organizes UChicago’s Poetry & Poetics Workshop, and works for Chicago Review. She is from Atlanta, Georgia.
