Element

"I gather the word / with my hands, carry them in my skirts," writes Kim Cope Tait in this beautifully structured and composed book, at once revealing a sensuousness about language and a need to possess language. Why? For one, this is a book where words like want, need, hunger, desire, and longing dominate a landscape that is incredibly present in its physicality. What a marvelous, smart, heart rending first book. Sometimes she seems like a reincarnation of Sappho gathering all love around her, sometimes an Odysseus searching for the love that eludes her. And maybe this is the secret of this terrific work, for it reveals our contradictory passions with a deft hand. In one poem she writes: "I don't / know how not to want what I / can't have. How not to be / the thing I am: a dandelion / gone to seed." Perhaps, but it is also true that here we have a poet whose seeds will grow anywhere, and especially in our hearts, from season to season, and beyond.

-- Richard Jackson, author of Alive All Day and Heartwall



Kim Cope Tait, like the troubadours who initiated the sestina verse form that provides her Element its architecture, knows how love is wholly sexual and present and, at the same time, wholly ideal and pure, and therefore unattainable but the stuff of who we are and who we know and how we love.

-- Ralph Angel, author of Anxious Latitudes and Twice Removed