THINE

“I just finished reading Kate Partridge’s THINE for the second time in a row. Now I’m even more certain that this book is one of the very best, if not the best new book of poems I’ve read in a good long time. Intelligent, understated, and as wryly funny as they are deeply, searchingly serious, Partridge’s poetic meditations evolve, turning again and again, always in unpredictable directions. Launched from observations of the natural world, or as likely, from a skeptic’s close reading of biblical and literary texts, the poet’s inquiries and thought- experiments reveal a generosity of spirit and perspicacity of mind that remind me of Marianne Moore’s quick wit and intellectual ferocity as well as Elizabeth Bishop’s affectionate ironies and dark unrevealed revelations. This is a book full of accuracies and mysteries, I will be returning to it with pleasure and maybe even some gusto.”

—Jennifer Atkinson

“The meditative lyrics in Kate Partridge’s THINE are unhurried and subtle, lucid and precise. Partridge tends to the art of observation with a voice at once eccentric and elegant, her vision of Americana as alert to the spark of new beginnings as to the embers of myth. Whether she turns her gaze on whitetail deer or desert hikes, Minimalist paintings or afternoons on the patio, Partridge shows us that the deepest acts of devotion can be as quiet as holding vigil, as keen as keeping watch.”

—Anna Journey

“With her exquisite formal poise and meticulous descriptive gifts, Kate Partridge conjures a metaphysics of faith in an ever-restless world. In her new collection, THINE, our natural surroundings echo with our conflicting desires for both harmony and elemental change. At times speculative and abstract, at times ripe with the fierce particulars of experience, these rich expansive poems are deeply compelling and unapologetically consoling.”

—David St. John

“THINE is a brilliant and insurgent ‘Theory of Paradise’ and exile, one that charts the municipal destruction of the natural world (‘California dumb with its glass buildings pressing their noses against each other. / California the vinyl flooring over the ground already drained.’), always searching for our dual source of identity: ‘Is it the people or the land… / the peopled land the landed people.’ Sacred in its dwellings and domesticities, THINE illumines what we have lost and to what we must cling with the final geography of our bodies: ‘beginning here. How we / are opening a little spark of time / and how it can be spent.’”

—Mark Irwin