Kristin Bock’s potent and undeniably original voice sings through this award-winning first collection. Enticing readers with transcendental pastorals, her spare wordplay is tinged with gothic imagery yet laced with an easy innocence. These are poems that enlighten and arouse, assuring us that if nothing on Earth may be taken at face value, neither may anything be taken for granted or lost.

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-55-2

Kristin Bock holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she teaches in the Business Communication Program. Her first collection, Cloisters, won Tupelo Press’s First Book Award and the da Vinci Eye Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Black Warrior Review, Columbia, Crazyhorse, FENCE, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill and VERSE. Bock is also a founding editor of the literary magazine Bateau, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow. She lives with her husband, artist Geoffrey Kostecki, in Montague, Massachusetts and together they restore liturgical art.

“Cloisters is a book that creates a sense of largeness despite its small borders…. Bock’s language is exquisite, wooing us into one lyric after another so swiftly that, even though we may not know where we are, we trust that Ms. Bock most certainly does. The effect is a book of almost God-like proportions: poems that we can observe and perceive but aren’t exactly certain we can fully understand…. Cloisters takes us into a world that at times seems secular and, at other times, clearly emanates from the spiritual; something akin to the afterlife, prayer. Cloisters is a book that not only explores but mimics the mysteries of human experience. We are the better for it.” –Rattle

“Poetry comes unbidden and it comes by design, with desire. I love this book’s adamant attentions and unashamed ardors.”” —Dara Wier

“Kristin Bock’s marvelous debut collection enacts an aesthetic of discrete moments, offering her reader an intelligence that works simultaneously upon the heart and at the margins of experience. The perspective here is edgy, nervous, compelling, and wise. In the pared delicacy of these poems, we discover both exceptional nuance and resonance—these are poems that trust their readers, poems that don’t oversell their emotions or perceptions. Kristin Bock’s poems are like the shards of a mirror that magically reflect a whole person, a whole woman, a whole mind and sensibility at work in the world. As in all of the best volumes of poetry, we come to admire the person in these poems, her vision and her character.” —David St. John, judge of the 7th Annual Tupelo Press First Book Award

“Kristin Bock’s poems are original and always surprising. Images are chiseled with great care, each word chosen with exacting particularity.” —James Tate

Darkling
They say I shouldn”t think of you.
As if you were a piano
at the bottom of the lake.
The worst I can do
is turn you into something.
They say I should think of you dead,
Though you are a flower,
bursting through armor.

The Hymn of the Pearl to the Moon
Cast in your image
and into darkness
we are luminous nudes
bathing
in the firelight
by cave pools
mistaking our reflections
for gods.

Return
Reverse the plough! Pluck me from this orchard of
bones—from the hummingbird flying backwards
to kiss an orchid. Free the sickle from its rust.
Break the blue cup on a balcony overlooking the sea,
and its enormous envy of the sea, and the sea itself—
its antiphonal call, its ten thousand dead languages
haunting the halls of shells marooned at our feet.
Release the Ferris wheel lying on its side—
half-buried in sand, half-eaten by a slow, salty wind.

0.4 lbs

6 × .5 × 9 in

Winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award

Winner of the 2009 da Vinci Eye Award