Dore Kiesselbach was raised in California and studied English and creative writing at Oberlin College and at the University of Iowa, where he held a Javits fellowship. He has published widely, in magazines such as the Antioch Review, Field, New Letters, and Poetry. In 2009, he won Britain’s Bridport Prize. Kiesselbach lives with his wife, master gardener Karin Ciano, in Minneapolis. (Author photo by Karin Ciano).
“I have followed, with pleasure, Dore Kiesselbach’s sinuous poems for several years. Some of them remind me of pythons wrapped around a tree limb above a riverbank. Those make me nervous. Others remind me of a favorite shirt, a shirt one will never relinquish, never. His poems, each one a tiny defibrillator, are a wonder.”
—Thomas Lux
“Such perfected attention to these nimbly alert, plainspoken poems, which go quiet where many go loud! Encyclopedic, from augers to monarchs to wild turkeys and witch trees, they leave ‘hoofprints’ on the mind. Kiesselbach keeps his eye (‘the predominant poet’s organ,’ William Carlos Williams said) on the unfolding, shifting mysteries crisscrossing our tracks; only teaching what he knows, outing speculative imagination, helping us ‘to let go.’”
—Stuart Friebert
“As the diver beholds ‘a moon dissolved in salt,’ so we behold the world transformed in these elegant, rigorous, unsparing poems by Dore Kiesselbach. With the problem-solving logic of syntax, a turkey falls dead from a tree, the duelist’s bullet turns a pocket watch to shrapnel, a stepfather works his world of harm. Morally acute and musically distillate, this is a book to celebrate.”
—Linda Gregerson
University of Pittsburgh Press
