To read Kingston is to be immersed in a world where all your senses are engaged at once: each poem a photo, a song, a scent. This collection invites us to voyage first to Mexico and then through a range of other sensory landscapes – both literal geographies and the geographies of childhood, motherhood, loss and love. In often incantatory rhythms and always lush sounds, we are shown how to relish language as a tool for full participation in experience, “as if each spice were its own vowel, each seasoning another consonant.” This is a volume you’ll want to read aloud: “all it asks of you is to taste, just taste.”

—Lisken Van Pelt Dus, author of How Many Hands to Home

In The Future Wears Camouflage Kate Kingston dazzles as few poets can. By turns imagistic, declarative, insistent, hers is a voice of urgency, from which language rich and daring never fails to delight while simultaneously stealing one’s breath. What lies on the surface becomes transformed, multi-layered, a deep dive or an ascending nova. Whether addressing students disappeared in Mexico or aspects of her own life, these poems come from an imagination with fierce sparkle and focus. Read “La Costa Rica” and remember why you fell in love with poetry.

—Peter Ludwin, author of An Altar of Tides

The poetry of Kate Kingston enters the reader as oracle full of revelation, sensory experiences and the magical language that embodies her work. Día de los Muertos in Mexico comes alive in the incense of copal, the taste of calla lily, the marimba of street music, wail of La Llorona, and the touch of the turtle’s shell. We follow Kingston as she “walks a field of tombstones,” dances “rumbas in the alley with painted skeletons,” and becomes “lost in the turbulence of celebration, hair strewn with flower petals, confetti and shards of light.”

—Susan Florence, author of Leftover Prayers

Kingston begins with a Foreword Poem: “Portrait of Mexico.” Her words fill her mouth like hornets, ready to buzz, sting, and protect her, “hive of vowels”. The poet’s narrative voice invokes their five senses with a fusion of body parts. The iris of her eyes, “smells of cinnamon bark”, their hair grows like a, “forest of coriander”. Here, Kingston revels in Magic Realism, where the ordinary is fantastical and everyday magic is evident. This conjuring of duende commences her collection.

—Shelli Rottschafer, Professor of Spanish and Chicanx Literature.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Kingston is the author of five collections of poetry. She is the recipient of the Crestone Wayfarer Poetry Award, the Karen Chamberlain Award in Poetry, the W.D. Snodgrass Award for Poetic Endeavor and Excellence, the Ruth Stone Prize, and the Atlanta Review International Publication Prize. Kingston has been awarded fellowships from the Colorado Council on the Arts, Harwood Museum, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Jentel, Ucross, and Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain, among others. Several of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.