Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound

For years now, I have marveled at the energy in Carolynn Kingyens' poems. Been in awe of their immediacy. These two enviable traits are on full display in her collection, Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound. This book is unflinching and unabashedly honest. There is nothing false here. She holds her readers close and shows us all that is intimate and sacred. The details and emotions housed in these poems so uniquely belong to Carolynn, and because of their vividness and humanity, they also belong to anybody who is lucky enough to read this book. I highly recommend this seismic and stunning debut.-Corey D. Cook, author of The Weight of Shadows (Finishing Line Press)We can be happily married and love our kids and still feel the devastation of the heart. That, Carolynn Kingyens reminds us, is the human feeling. These restless lyric poems probe for the sacred among the diseases and anxieties and cats and broken bones and cracked bowls of Brooklyn. Kingyens tells everything. She leaves nothing out, and finds, over and over, gold. As, in her grandmother's bathroom, when she first touched a crucifix: "nailed to the floral pattern wall, / above the light switch- / Christ's eyes forever cast down, / staring at ... little jars of beauty cream, / and an old photo of her only son, / my father ..." This is a ferociously honest, compassionate book-John Wall Barger, author of The Mean GameCarolynn Kingyens' poetry addresses the passage from innocence to experience, the effects of time, already implicit in our beings-even before the big bang makes a sound: life a series of betrayals and losses. A sense of sin and salvation overhangs this, though these are not "religious" poems at all. As she writes in "The Attic," "It's years later" when she encounters a photograph of herself as a girl in "her pre-baby body," that unsullied person "who is unaware of all the kneeling to come." Often set in the chaos and tumult of New York City, these poems show us a woman navigating the rough seas that confront us all. -Charles Rammelkamp, author Me and Sal Paradise and Mortal Coil