In her highly ambitious second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg takes her inspiration from the alphabet.

A meditation on the hump of a camel, and what it hides. A reminder that tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, and a vision of the plant as Adam's downfall. The Book of Kells, gold-leafed and extravagantly decorated by monks. Titled for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, these poems are richly grounded in objects both humble and exotic. Vandenberg explores the intersection of power and forgiveness, and deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in emotionally poignant ways. "What will protect us?" one poem asks. "The words will be our weapons. In the end."

Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World unearths meaning--with astonishing beauty--from the pain of loss and separation.

Author: Katrina Vandenberg
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 05/15/2012
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.30d
ISBN: 9781571314468

About the Author
Katrina Vandenberg is the co-author, with Todd Boss, of the chapbook entitled On Marriage (Red Dragonfly Press, 2008), and the author of the poetry collection Atlas (Milkweed Editions, 2004). Her poems and essays have appeared in the American Scholar, Post Road Magazine, Orion Magazine, the Iowa Review, and other magazines. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bush Artist Fellowship, a Loft-McKnight Award in Poetry, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference. In 2008-09, she was the resident fellow at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, Massachusetts. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with her husband, the novelist John Reimringer.