Praise and Reviews

“What are the poems like? Inventive, capricious, witty, aphoristic. There are bebop parts where what she’s doing is throwing words into a pan slicked with boiling oil and watching ’em explode all over the kitchen…If you set about making your first book with your eyes steady on the prize (“What do I really like? what do I actually get off on?”) you might coin a classic. That’s what I think we’re looking at here. Now the issue is: Can she keep from being corrupted by reviews like this.” —Anthony Madrid, RHINO

“The shudder (uncanny recognition) and thwart of sundaey did impossible things to me, and impossible things are a terrifying comfort (miracles). I could never get whatever object was behind the veil of those Magic Eye™ posters to reveal itself to me—in that movie Mallrats it was supposed to be a boat. But I can everywhere apprehend the category of object to which the boat belongs in and because of Ihns’s debut. There it is, “rocking in its dirty subjacence,” subject to being “wildly used” to ferry us to some vantage from which we recognize what we make the boat to carry: “tissue that has a form for its history / specific past its species.” Species, as Sylvia Wynter teaches, is not just science, but myth too, thus can and must be re-auto-instituted, made through language totally changed—no presto but then, “/how it has pleased the world to determine the matter.” Here is a book that asks you how you feel, basically what’s the matter, and refracts for you a gorgeous romp by which felt knowledge is produced alongside the pain of its being described. You can have a revealed world, too, not just on a day of rest, but as a treat—sundaey!” —Jane Gregory, author of YEAH NO and My Enemies

“Kirsten Ihns’s Sundaey weaves philosophical engagement into poetic performance. In the pages of this book, words are made pictures of the ideas they reflect, introducing a break in the reflection in which we can see ourselves reflecting. In this interruption, which is a kind of broken mirror for the intensity of the gaze we give to language, is the most brilliantly convincing self-portrait and study of the demonstrating voice.” —Edgar Garcia, author of Skins of Columbus: A Dream Ethnography

“‘. . . i sing quat swan / i sing hat check /////// sing trick and deck,’ some impossible love-child of Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein might sing. Or is this the implausible love-child of Tan and Tao Lin? ‘/i wanted to be as good as an amazon review,’ types this post-ambien(t) poet, ‘as laid bare /           in my interjections /               like one name being used by two people.’ Whitman, Stein, Lins, meet Kirsten Ihns—our American stenographer of emergent devotions, systemic derangements, and a cryptic magnificence beyond reason. ‘be a form of vast comportment,’ this work asks of itself, ‘at all points permit the ornament to wash /     up on the shores of a real decorum.’ Sundaey is a mesmerizing debut, a detonated confection, and a deliquescent cosmology ‘like the world /       /delicto, uncertain, stopless, asking /                                    in whose image have you /                                            deformed the material.’” —Srikanth Reddy, author of Facts for Visitors

About the Author

Kirsten (Kai) Ihns received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and recently completed her PhD at the University of Chicago, where she studied perceptual time structures in contemporary film and experimental poetics (1970-2023). Individual poems appear or are forthcoming in Hyperallergic, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, TAGVVERK, The Iowa Review, NO MATERIALISM, PoetryNow/The Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere, and recent pamphlets are available from the Earthbound Poetry Series (London, UK), slub press (London, UK), and The Creative Writing Department (Los Angeles, USA). Currently, she works as a Humanities Teaching Fellow at UChicago, and as an editor at Chicago Review (2020-Jan 2024) and FENCE.