Back Through Interruption

Kate Northrop’s Back Through Interruption is a deeply moving and thought-provoking collection of poetry. It takes the reader through a world that is at once beautiful and tragic, sacrosanct and profane. “Kate Northrop’s elegant, intelligent, wonderfully plotted first book, Back Through Interruption, has been born under the sign of the double helix and is governed by that shape. These are poems of being two: woman and man, daughter and mother, sister and sister. Like magnets they are held together by attraction or parted by force of opposition. In these poems, no matter what changes in the cast of characters, what is important is that they are all creatures in, and creations of, a text.”—Lynn Emanuel, judge“Kate Northrop’s poems are drawn ineluctably to the place where passion and intelligence collide—and often they end with passion having fled and intelligence standing alone, surveying ‘the way we travel into memory.’ But Northrop’s intelligence is so coruscating that it possesses all the passion of passion itself. ‘I would be judged,’ says a woman on the verge of adultery, ‘and what was individual / would collapse under the burden / of a story.’ But she is wrong. In these dazzling poems, individuals and their stories stand side by side, each making the other glow more brightly than they would alone.”—Andrew Hudgins