How To Hold a Flying River

Overview

A journey that illuminates the yearning, rage, and tenderness embodied in all we cannot hold

Fleeting fragrances, fragments of dream and memory, secrets whispered in the night, painful collisions with reality, consolations drawn from music and clouds: these poems move relentlessly through shadow and light as they circle, question, and confront the turbulence of being human. They stretch sensitive drumskins over frames of close observation, resonant understatement, and silences rich with insight. Ultimately, the poems are exhortations—for heaven to "rest your head on my knees"—and invitations for the reader to enter a space where the ineffable dwells.

Reviews

"Implicit in this irresistible title, How to Hold a Flying River, is a poetry of the ineffable and ephemeral, its metaphor striving toward the light and shadow of all we cannot hold..." —Mark Irwin, author of American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014)

"The haunting beauty of Martha Kalin's poems rest in things seen and not seen, objects and people and emotions resting in the shadows. [...] How to Hold a Flying River is a gorgeous, complex book, one I'll be thinking about for a long time." —Michael Henry, author of No Stranger Than My Own and Active Gods

"These poems soar with transcendent mystery, the title's glimpse of her impossible paradoxes. Kalin is a poet of unparalleled brilliance." —Joy Roulier Sawyer, author of Lifeguards and Tongues of Men and Angels

Author Biography

Martha Kalin is the 2019 winning recipient of the Terry J. Cox Poetry Award and author of the chapbook, Afterlife and Mango. She holds degrees from Brandeis University and the University of Michigan, where she received a Major Hopwood Award for Poetry. In addition to writing, she has spent much of her professional life working to improve services for the vulnerable and disenfranchised in health care settings. She lives and writes in Denver, Colorado.