Anybody Home?

The poems in Kay Cosgrove's first collection, Anybody Home? are driven by curiosity - about herself, the world, and her place in it. Witty and elegantly restrained, they ask the question: how do we live the lives we've made for ourselves? Cosgrove roams from barrooms to checkout lines to the enigma of motherhood; she is a teenager responsible for a sack-of-flour-as-a-baby, and then an adult driving a teenage babysitter home. She explores the texture of our connections to strangers, family, ourselves, and illuminates the sublime in the unimportant. The poems in Anybody Home? embrace life's sweetness and shadows. Here, the ordinary is unfathomable and the ineffable is ordinary.

At dusk last night I blew the biggest bubble

for my girls. It captured everything:

the black shutters and dead-headed geraniums,

two cars and two girls and a skinny man

pulling weeds - all of it

so hard to see

except when it floats

in a crystal ball

right before your eye.

Excerpt from "God's Law is not Fully Knowable to Human Beings, Thomas Aquinas Wrote" by Kay Cosgrove