Self-Portrait with Cephalopod

By Kathryn Smith

Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod—selected by francine j. harris as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction.

Here, Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and light—but never false hope. Instead, she incises our vanities and our hypocrisies, “the bloody hand holding back / the skin,” revealing “the world’s inner workings, / rubbery and caught between the teeth.” These are the poems of someone who feels her and our failings in the viscera, in the bones, and who bears witness to that pain on the page.

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment, meditative and resolutely unsentimental.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781571317483

Kathryn Smith

Kathryn Smith has always loved happy endings. From the bedtime stories her wildly imaginative mother told, to the soap operas she wasn't supposed to watch, Kathryn loved to speculate as to how the characters would end up. Needless to say the entire Smith household heard about it when things did not go as young Kathryn thought they ought. Through her school years, Kathryn wrote stories and books for her friends to read. Even during college, when she studied journalism, her need to make up her own tales often drove her to late nights at the typewriter, writing about sexy men and the women they fell in love with. Fortunately, Kathryn's idea of sexy has changed over the years. Instead of rock stars and spies she writes about lords and...well, spies. The best part is she gets to share these stories with a few more people than were in her homeroom class!

Book preview

1.

Creation Myth

And the Lord said let ants be fed

from the egg caps of walking stick

insects that hatch disguised as ants.

Let impostors pass undetected

from a subterranean nest. Let fur-bound

beasts carry exoskeletal beasts from one

hinged continent to another, and let land-

bridges break. Let humans break land

and build bridges from elements dug

from the land. Let rats unhinge ribs

from spines and climb through pipes

invented by humans to keep our

shit and nakedness away from

the shit and nakedness of rats.

Let humans set poisoned traps.

And thus I tell you: An erroneous