Unreliable Tree

Margot Kahn is the author of the biography Horses That Buck and coeditor of two essay anthologies, This Is the Place and Wanting. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.

"Kahn speaks for our time, making full use of all the traditions of poetry, but the poems are the products of a completely unique sensibility. These poems are full of suggestion and mystery, full of strong music and vivid imagery I have never read this kind of poetry before, and my life would be lesser if I never had." - Laura Kasischke, author of Lightning Falls in Love "Amidst blackberries, barns, bats, and low tides, at dead ends and ditches and traffic lights, Margot Kahn pays attention, asserts, 'I like that I'm a woman who can still / be curious when she turns a corner.' This is a controlled, compressed, lyrical collection of couplets and beautiful diction, of rhythmic syntax - a collection of body and time and the natural world. The Unreliable Tree also acknowledges a held history of the Holocaust, ancestors who survived, who created the legacy of this poet, who claims, 'My whole life I've wanted // to be that girl - plated, chained, impenetrable. / To take the field first, to reveal myself later.' You'll want to read and reread these poems of motherhood and marriage, of desire and inquiry, poems that invite you to find 'solution to dissolution: / alight in the places that will hold you. / Pass through darkness / with the swiftest grace." - Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

• I.Marrying On a Spring Sunday, I Forget My Wedding Ring Nordstrom Lingerie Field of Vision The World in My Phone amp Out the Window Accidental Hosts Precaution My Mother Could Always Wear Anything Cold Creek An Opening Western Tanager II. Plum Season Exile A Quiet Day with the West on Fire Fermata Light in the Hand Dinner Electroencephalogram The Cleaner The Towels Ode to Trichotillomania Free Boat at the Corner of Kjargaard amp Fisherman Bay III. Practice at the Community Courts August Mixed Feelings about My Contribution to Humanity After a Mass Shooting On the Bus Through Oregon In Which I Excuse Freddy Mercury from P.E. Rancho Bar After a Winter Storm If Someone Says Catalina Walking to the End of the Road on the Last Day of July IV. Taking Advantage of a Summer’ s Day Morning Reverie Wanting In the Armor Court Beforetimes During the Pandemic, I Give You a Haircut On Dissolution Into the OR Post-Op Winter Skiing Acknowledgments