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Generous praise for KPrevallet's new book, forthcoming February 2025!
Kristin Prevallet has been a wildly performative and investigative poet for decades, always at the edge of what matters, what she studies and transforms into trenchant meditative activist language. The meadow is what is needed; we return to it, to grow, to return. Asphodel Meadows are an ancient section of hell in Greek mythology where souls (poets?) kept on churning, even in the underworld.
-Anne Waldman
KPrevallet’s new book A Borrowed and Often Tender Multiplicity animates my view of the agency of plants and their relationship to humans. She achieves this goal in several ways. Whatever she writes in these marvelous and shape-shifting poems appears initially as one thing but quickly becomes another: “lake that is / no longer lake but a hole in the ground where the water is…” In her poems even agents become the things they affect: “everything that falls is gravity….” With such radical reallocations of language, the poems themselves no longer operate in the distanced and disrupted conditions of modern politics but her language becomes what it points to, what’s supposed to be impossible.… Tender Multiplicity achieves these wonderous transformations through pairing plant descriptions with poems displacing plant identity to “remove all nouns from your vision.”
–James Sherry
In "A Few Stray Comments on the Cultivation of the Lyric" Gustaf Sobin wrote: "don't write a poem: grow it. it's a shoot(the breath-in-sprig) that we'd train onto a trellis:... the poem grows out of the poem, not out of one's own particular intellect. the intellect is merely a guide, a gardener, to those shoots, to those roots: to that ever deeper set of imperatives which are first of all organic". No poet has ever more fully lived this compositional practice than K Prevallet in A Borrowed and Often Tender Multiplicity; here plants are poems and textual lineage, and poems are specific plants,both lyric and researched. Prevallet, who almost singlehandedly brought the poetry of Helen Adam back into presence, now draws deeply from that witches' brew of life magic and medicine, often returning us to a meadow, as in Robert Duncan. In "Arnica", framed for us by Hildegard, we learn that "In the woods I was born but not to a mother/A Monster, a mutter, a mute woman with a gun/And gin to the brim", even as the book deeply plumbs the loss of one's mother, deepening the paradox and mystery. "Imagination - Imago- Mythos" all flow here into the richest kind of eco-poetics we could ever hope for.
—Leonard Schwartz, author of many books including The Flaco Series(), forthcoming.
These poems honor the aptitudes of the green-life that sustains us and offer insightful testaments to plants we can encounter beyond our naming. In their variety, this gathering of insights ranges from the arrival at embodiment amidst the embodied lives of plants, through the shock of unexpected encounters and the cherishing of the plant world, to innovative evocations of the healing power of medicinal plants. The scale ranges across cosmic spheres to sidewalks in Brooklyn, all animated with originality and verbal acuity.
—Mary Newall
An anima-materia medica, with the lyric ear of a good spell, KPrevallet’s …Tender… Meadowing…, the work of decades, makes me want to run outside to be with those green ones I love. These poems know that bodies are archives and portals, and that plants are the ancestors, conversation partners, and healers who know where we’ve been and where we’re going. I am outside, already, reading it. – —Gillian Osborne