Toward the Wild Abundance

Kristin Brace writes poetry, fiction, and children’s literature. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Fence, Patio, Blessed Virgin. Brace earned an MFA in writing from Spalding University, and her work has appeared in journals such as Fiction Southeast, The Louisville Review, Water~Stone Review, Chariton Review, and The Other Journal. She previously served as executive director of the Grand Rapids Creative Youth Center, where kids become published authors. Brace plays the accordion, studies Italian, and loves Lake Michigan in every season. She makes her home in West Michigan with her husband, the entrepreneur and inventor Neal Brace. She can be found online at www.kristinbrace.com.

“Kristin Brace’s Toward the Wild Abundance is a painterly book, not just in its evocations of Bonnard, Matisse, and Cassatt, but in the quality of light that threads the poems. It’s an intimate light that ‘blurs’ and ‘whirs,’ ‘streams’ like a ribbon from a chickadee’s beak. The light here goes absent at the mouth of a cave, comes to us in snow light, drips like butter. We might ask, as the speaker of one of these poems does, ‘Who tilted the room to let the light spill so?’ And does our world really shine back with such beauty? This book says yes, points us toward and toward.”—Laura Donnelly, author of Watershed, winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize "Kristin Brace possesses a marvelous delicacy of attention, tuned to the stillness deer carry with them—sheen of light through an insect’s body—'ferns / patient as dinosaurs'—'mouse / with a pulse like wishing'! I love her imaginative possession of the moment, of joy, and of sorrow, by way of the dear infinitesimal."—Nancy Eimers, author of Oz"Notice that easily missed 'Toward' in the title of Kristin Brace’s elegantly down-to-earth collection. Through her unpretentiously precise language, she is taking us 'toward,' and along the way drawing our attentiveness to all that matters. These poems of the numinous reveal a world vacant of mere theory and speculation. Brace longs for lives where we love wastefully and stand in awe, whether it be before a work by Bonnard, a basil plant, or a clumsily played accordion. In 'A Pomegranate, or a Rhyming Couplet,' the speaker says, 'And this tablecloth / is a garden where I / could lose myself / and maybe find / us.' It is an abundant walk, this with the gently fierce Brace Toward the Wild Abundance."—Jack Ridl, author of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

• Contents 1. Someone, Some Afternoon Looking at Rooms Upside Down Dream to Start the New Administration Just Visiting The Year of the Cicada Requiem Empty Boats If You Love It Enough Bonnard A Pomegranate, or a Rhyming Couplet 2. That Pale Blue Space Headache Monologue of an Unknown Model Re-creationism The Names of Things Somewhere in Newfoundland It's happening again so I'm writing William Stafford and George Eliot: A Conversation Sunday in the New House When I Hear a Gentle Knocking Migraine Hates Turbulent Change Outside the Frame 3. Everything Familiar and Strange Intuitively Meaningful Units of Lost Days Bathmat Wide Awake Not-Nursery-Rhymes At the Café To Do Verb 333 Body of Work Sometimes, pink clematis climbing Portrait of Valentine Godé-Darel by Ferdinand Hodler (1914) Squander Lukewarm Coffee at a Blue Desk in Michigan Triptych of Saints and Mistakes Fragments 4. You Might Be Yourself Origin My Life As an Impressionist Painting Lament Incomplete Interview with a Writer Sometimes a Sadness Comes And Then the Props Withdraw When the Tamarack's Needles Turn Golden The Day Is a Too Big Jacket Another Morning Words Become Strange Murder in Winter Daily Reminders Before After To the Patron Saint of Ceiling Cracks 5. Even the Purple Shadows In sleep, his hand Communion No Address Needed Donuts Among the Dead Ask Me How I Know This You + You The Meeting Place Frida and Joan Good morning, my love- Any number of reasons Remnant Composition 6. Where the Grass Still Greens Day before Solstice, Week after Rain Poor Oatmeal Girls at Window by Berthe Morisot (1892) After, we'll put on our dancing shoes Ancestor Vision Hand-Me-Down After Reading A Simple Heart Words Like Luminous and Lover Someone else's house Author's Acknowledgments Series Acknowledgments