In the ice house

By Genevieve Kaplan

Genevieve Kaplan’s In the ice house offers an innovative meditation on domestic life and the physical world that surrounds it, chronicling “at least the beginnings of some disaster” taking place in a landscape that “had no symmetry.” Deftly channeling poets like Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, as well as invoking Kaplan’s own distinct poetic sensibility, these poems reveal an atmospheric and wondrous world filled with odd and compelling images. Readers confront the menace of the ordinary, “the whale-faced spout of the drainpipe, the cluck / of the chicken-bird” and how “the light attacks / the window and the stress of the shining / does not ease.” The poet’s insistent evocation of elemental images—the birds, the ice, the water—becomes almost incantatory, as the speaker seeks escape from “the frantic outside” she’s trapped within. Kaplan’s sky “has the depth / of an ocean,” and this book deeply articulates how “silence is the only word that can replace loss.” Moving artfully between internal desires and incisive observations of the external, these stunning poems radiate with both heat and ice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781597091756

Book preview

In the ice house

In the ice house

poems by

Genevieve Kaplan

 Red Hen Press | Pasadena, California 

In the ice house

Copyright © 2011 by Genevieve Kaplan

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

Book design and layout by Kathrine Davidson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kaplan, Genevieve.

In the ice house : poems / by Genevieve Kaplan. —1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-59709-462-7

I. Title.

PS3611.A649I5 2011

811’.6—dc22

2011004171

The Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs partially support Red Hen Press.

Published by Red Hen Press

www.redhen.org

First Edition

Acknowledgements

Some of these poems were first published in the following journals and anthologies: Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Dorado, Front Porch,The Loudest Voice: Volume 1, Mrs. Maybe, The Northwest Review, The One Three Eight, West Wind Review, Word for/Word, and Zoland Poetry. My sincere thanks to the editors.

The publication of this book was made possible by A Room of Her Own Foundation’s To the