Praise:
“In Castaway, Katie Riegel writes of the haunting lights and darks of childhood, a place where ‘the corn is so tall a child could walk into it and disappear’ and winters where ‘sun strik[es] off ice like organ music.’ This is one of the few books of poetry that has a genuine heartbeat. You’ll swear you can even hear a pulse, or maybe that could just be your heart sighing and heaving as you turn the page. These poems nearly glitter with the sad-lovely sense that you can’t ever go home again, but in Riegel’s sure and steady poems, you will find a new, dear friend that will make an attempt so very worth your while.” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“In these haunted, green-drenched, and wind-blown poems set in the open plains of the Midwest, Katherine Riegel deftly wrestles with themes of erosion and impermanence: a home that is lost and now only exists as the idea of home, a family’s slow-motion unraveling, bodies lost to illness, and selves lost to time. A castaway from a lost paradise that can’t ever quite be gotten back to, the speaker in these poems mourns ‘the hard half-truth/of a child’s ownership–that whatever/one has can always be taken away,’ igniting a series of meditations on all that’s cast away, irretrievably lost, and sometimes–through an acceptance of the ultimate unrecoverability of things–unexpectedly returned to us in different incarnations. ‘You know yourself/what wounds is the same/for all of us,’ Riegel writes, and these are indeed poems of piercing clarity and compassion.” —Lee Ann Roripaugh
From the book:
LOST
Through fields of swaying grasses
that bloom and rise a dark flock
under monuments laughing in the earth and seeping salt
we ride in tiny open cars, in baskets, on sleds, on
horseback We navigate
gray trees capes catching ghosts in our hands
(they glow like fireflies) and still
we rove we move always moving
because sometimes a whisper crawls
towards us a tendril curling and grasping
prehensile It carries red stones on its tongue
It speaks of all
we have given away all we have yet
to know
and we want
to ask it questions to listen at night
our foreheads pressed to cold
windows
We want
nothing that we have We
want to stop We want to
arrive at the green river
where someone familiar will take us by the elbow
and help us board the glittering barge