Le storie più mute

Yale Series of Younger Poets

by Katherine Larson, Pietro Federico (Translator)

«Una volta credevo che la scienza si occupasse / solo di certezza. Più tardi ne ho riconosciuto il mistero» scrive Katherine Larson, biologa molecolare e rivelazione della poesia americana, qui per la prima volta in italiano. «Nel mio laboratorio le cellule immortali / di un tumore si dividono e dividono… / niente è sublime o lo è ogni cosa»: il suo modo di concepire l’esistenza nasce dalla consapevolezza di essere stati prima di tutto misteriosamente visti, e di esserlo stati insieme al più piccolo filo d’erba e al moto migratorio delle nuvole. Anche per questo nella Larson non si trova mai il tentativo di spiegare, perché «non esiste un linguaggio per questo, / per il modo in cui ti vedo quando splendi». Così questa nuova poesia a molti appare come il baluardo per la difesa della civiltà occidentale.

Genres: Poetry, 21st Century, Female Authors

128 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2011

About the author

Award winning artist who sold her first painting when she was fourteen years old.

Previously lived in Phoenix, Arizona and currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Reviews

[sarah]

“There are days that walk through me
and I cannot hold them.“

[Christopher Rutenber · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most simplistic definition of radial symmetry is “the beauty of circles,” which is exactly what this collection presents: various facets of life, though a great deal of them have to do with trips to an ocean alongside the desert (Mexico?) for vacations or to study the wildlife (Larson is a biologist). She describes the beauty of such creatures with radial symmetry, those both alive and dead. Larson ever contrastts life and death, beauty and pain. In one poem she compares calls the fragmenting of clouds awkward, like little children learning to operate left handed scissors. The poem “Pomegranates” describes her studying cancer cells, the living cells of a dead person. She dissects anemones and fish and thinks of the touch of a lover. Everything is equal in beauty to Larson, which is the precise definition of radial symmetry. If life is a circle than everything, every wedge in that circle is equal in form to the rest of the pieces. She writes, “Either everything’s sublime or nothing is,” as her thesis. In the final poem she compares herself to a “fisherman who longed … for the arms of God.” Larson’s juxtaposition of images, her ear for the sounds of words, combined with a knowledge of biology make the book beautiful and fascinating, with no poem (as unique as they all are) more beautiful or compelling than the rest.

[Maisie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

impressively cohesive, also foreword by Louise Glück so that speaks for itself

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this was on the "to-read" shelf for over a year, and after plowing through it last night I recall why. I read/study the poem "Statuary" in several classes every year, and it kinda blows my mind. It's the first poem in this collection, which I hoped would be full of similarly dazzling poems, and none of the other poems are its equal. Only two in fact--"Love at Thirty-Two Degrees" and "Risk"--are even in contention. Larson's no one-hit wonder, many of these poems are strong, but it starts on such a high note that it's hard not to be disappointed by what follows.

So if the following poem doesn't blow your skirt up, please feel free to skip this collection:

"Statuary"

The late cranes throwing
their necks to the wind stay
somewhere between
the place that rain begins
and the place that it ends
they seem to exist just there
above the horizon at least
I only see them that way
tossed up
against the gray October
light not heavy enough
for feet to be useful or
useless enough to make
gravity untie its string. I’m sick
of this stubbornness
but the earthworms
seem to think it all right
they move forward
and let the world pass
through them they eat
and eat at it, content to connect
everything through
the individual links
of their purple bodies to stay
one place would be death.
But somewhere between
the crane and the worm
between the days I pass through
and the days that pass
through me
is the mind. And memory
which outruns the body and
grief which arrests it.

2019 Reread: i was right from the start.

[silas denver melvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

maybe will appreciate later in life, or just on another read

[Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prose just cannot stir the soul like poetry. My dog-eared Rumi and coffee-stained Elizabeth Bishop never leave my nightstand. So what an utter delight to be introduced to the young poet Katherine Larson(by D., a charming, brown-eyed, soulful poet himself). Larson captures the wretched and sublime of life with the eye of a biologist and the heart of a poet. There is a delight on every page. Read this now.

[Anya · Rating 4 out of 5]

HOLY HELL.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes I read poetry, and it just doesn't connect for me. Then I wonder if the problem is with me. Other times, there is poetry that just feels right. I may not understand all of it, or know the context it was written in, but it feels good. These poems feel good. A Yale Younger Poets award winner. The poet is also a molecular biologist, and this shows in the poems. I love the intersection of science and art, life in all it's forms. I do hope to hear more from this poet.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a film where the best bits are in the trailer, I kept getting tastes force fed to me on tumblr. I can only read

‘‘There are days that walk through me / and I cannot hold them.’’

Only a few hundred times before I want to hold It All. I can only read

“Forgive me this old / habit. There is a danger / in making suffering / beautiful.”

Many hundreds of times before I need to investigate the danger.

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a wonderful, smart introduction to this book by Louise Gluck, about, other things, beauty in contemporary poetry. Beauty is hugely, hugely important to me, and Gluck talks about why poets and readers often shy away from it (in part because it really inspires silence, rather than discourse, as a response). Anyway, Radial Symmetry is very, very beautiful, and this is one of the qualities that I loved best about it and that made it such a joy to read. It's also concerned with the enormous themes... love and transience and the fleeting very physical world... I never get tired of reading about those, and I'm always grateful when poems are brave enough to take them on and be beautiful at the same time. Katherine Larson is also a biologist, and her book is full of surprising and new (to me) details about marine life and dissection, but it's all accessible and not too science-y. So happy I read this.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 // "Radial Symmetry" is a moving lyric collection from poet Katherine Larson. Larson's up-close encounters with the natural world are remarkably portrayed in these poems. Larson's observations are as apt and livening as Elizabeth Bishop's, and yet her scientific lens provides even more eerily enlightening images for her readers. Larson's poems are ones of wonder and mystery; such hauntings in these pages. At their best, the poems speak as if to the world and to us. "I used to believe that science was only concerned / with certainty. Later, I recognized its mystery. / There isn't language for it," Larson writes in her poem Crypsis and Mimicry, and yet Larson is a poet who, quite successfully, attempts to assign language to that very mystery. Music, resonance, and form are all at work in the poems of this collection. Poems to return to and savor for years to come. A provoking and beautiful book.

[Tamára Pinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I used to believe that science was only concerned with certainty. Later, I recognized its mystery.
There isn’t language for it—
The way I can see you when you are shining.
Our roots crypsis, our wings mimicry."

Who would've thought that people in STEM had this depth to them!! Joking aside, poets and writers who studied STEM have a very different feel to them, and the wealth of knowledge infused into their work is so palpable and refreshing. This book was an expedition, a voyage into nature as the key to unlock an experience or an emotion. So vivid yet so dream-like. And all the ekphrases, I am in love.

This is one of those poetry books you must read aloud and taste.

[Inverted · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not really a fan of quoting the whole collection in the introduction, but Glück is exact where she is not citational. I love how varied the poems are, and—due to Larson's steady voice—how unified. Her poise, the rich fauna, and the multiple spaces that strangely coexist in her poems, that is somehow Dark Hours , minus the city. Impressive debut.

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an exciting first collection--I keep learning new ways to fall in love with it.

[david · Rating 5 out of 5]

5/5

been waiting for this book since the issue of Poetry in 2006 when Love at 32 Degrees was published. didn't disappoint.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

“poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious; because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.”

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are easy to read so that one may be immediately immersed into the images and have more space to break past different worlds of meaning. In other words, the directness and everydayness of language allows one to appreciate the beauty of all the images and the wonder of suggestive ideas all the more forcefully. This is my cup of tea. While I’ve enjoyed puzzling through poems of more oblique styles, I like this sort of immersion the most, at this point in my life at least. Moreover, Larson has a good amount and balance of narrative and particular details; my imagination knew where to go, and I loved the places she let me into.

Larson was a biologist, and this partially explains how unusual and pungent her imagery is. We encounter the details of specific flora and fauna. It is the striking unforeseen details of the natural world that unify the ways emotions and narrative are expressed, as opposed to geographical location, time/mood of one’s life, or other dimensions that more often unify a collection of poetry. I now feel a hankering to look out for all of the beings and their activities beheld by nature, which are usually invisible to us. This is a delightful effect of reading this collection of poems, in addition to the pleasure of the beautiful experience of reading them.

Here are some excerpts I particularly liked:

“Have you ever wanted to/ kiss a stranger’s hands?… Gaugin writes to Theo Van Gogh that in his/ painting he wants to suggest/ the idea of suffering—without every explaining/ what kind.”

“Here are the goblets filled with wine./ The smell of sunlight/ fading from the stones. Quietness that’s solitude/ but not isolation. And the windows lit/ with displays of red corals/ from use off the coast/ said to be the blood that streamed/ from Medusa’s severed neck/ when Perseus laid her head beside the sea/“

“I was in Belfast, you were hospitalized and/ tested. I kept dreaming of doctors with enormous hands/ abusing flowers./ And of a sericulture room, dimly lit/ where the single/ long filaments of silkworms/ were drawn from empty cocoons/ by machines—/ My entomology professor once said: On the cephalothorax of the brown recluse/ there is a pattern like a violin./ Forgive me this old habit. There is a danger/ in making suffering beautiful”

[Andrew Wei · Rating 3 out of 5]

Biologist-poet Katherine Larson writes poems with, well, biological themes. Her imagery is startling and gorgeous at times, but it is also confined. There are only so many times I can see the clasping mussels and pearlescent parrotfish, which is a shame because I think Larson genuinely has more range than this. Nonetheless, there is a lot of beauty in Radial Symmetry. From Crypsis and Mimicry:

"So autumn slips into the swamplands
with glossy alligator eyes. We talk of love potions
while drinking café noir. Powdered lizards
and tender missives scrawled with blood. How her
grandmother crushed peach seeds with stones
to draw dirt to the bottom of a pail of bayou water:
a speckled fish could flatten itself against those
sediments and simply fade away. She used to dream
there was a hole in the bucket and so the task
was never-ending. That’s crypsis—
everything against intrinsic terrain dissolves in it."

Another:

"The blankets were wet, but we dragged them anyway
to the dunes where we drank bitter coffee
and peeled cold, boiled eggs. In the distance, bonfires.
The stars opening and shutting like tiny fly-traps
with their green ashed-out, inked-over. The stillness enough
to hear pistol shrimp snap in the tide pools."


I like Statuary and parts of Act IV the most.

"Things that are equal to the same things are equal to each other, says Euclid.
Here, the morning birds are equal to the dawn.
The stone wall to the shore, where jellyfish like terrible offerings
present themselves each day to rot,
sheer centers surrounded by violet circles.
I trace them as he would have—beginning to end."

"The man upstairs just lost
his wife to cancer.
He is moving himself out
of the apartment by
throwing something new
from the window every
day. Sometimes there are
enormous crashes on the balcony."

Honestly looking back, I really enjoy a lot of the snippets I've highlighted. But I think the collection is missing something, and parts of it feel Tumblr-esque (in a trite way). I feel like Larson might be a better prose writer than poet (and as such I'm excited to read Wedding of the Foxes), but I also wish she would diversify her imagery a bit. This is a phenomenal work, and in the future if I wrote a poetry collection this good I would be really happy.

[Yumeko (blushes) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Were I to attempt a description:
serenity in a state of constant and feverish chaos; a state that seems to always speak of its end, but an epilogue we're only ever teased with.

"On the lawn of my childhood house,
an operating table, doctors,
a patient under a sheet. I walk up.
Under the webbing of IVs,
a surgeon hands me a silver comb
and I start brushing the patient’s hair
like I did my mother’s when I was a girl.
The nurse lifts the sheet.
It isn’t my mother. It’s the monkey.
I bend my ear to its dying lips
and it says:
You haven’t much time— risk it

It's not a great idea to state an instance of an event that fits your theory as evidence supporting it, a better approach is to find a single instance that does not submit. Though I'm not trying too hard to prove anything, the description I give really does not stand for some other poems in the book; words I would use to describe them: insistent, hurried, uncanny, strange in the familiar, and even, almost contrary to what I started out saying, chaos in the utterly ordinary.
It does occur to me that specificity is lost.

[MJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I never have anything to say about the Yale Younger Poets books that Louise Gluck didn't already say in the foreword. Okay, maybe I will later, I'm just. 🙃

"Sequence and consequence, the drama of unfolding story, play almost no role here. Nor is data organized into argument. Rather events and images are held together in some fluid medium which preserves them without changing them: the whole sequence has the fascination of a prism."

. . .

"Excerpts cannot give a sense of the power such lines have in a poem that has taken its time accruing. Pacing is essential: the gravity of these unequivocal, summarizing assertions depends absolutely on the sustained images and vignettes that precede them."

for further consideration:
-the line breaks, which means I have to get my hands on this not as an ebook
-the strange pivots in who the poems seem to be addressing
-???

[Carlota · Rating 4 out of 5]

“There are days that walk through me
and I cannot hold them.”

Absolutely beautiful, words spilling from places, from feelings, you won’t expect. Yet I found some parts of this somewhat insipid, like we’re being told exactly what we want to be told. Overall, it was a very strong Part I (I mean Santuary unsettled me immensely) to a semi-decent Parts II to IV.

[H]

i never knew
that days were held together by singing.

or that those who suffered
could be attended to
long after they had gone.

been trying to read a few more of louise glück’s yale picks—and katherine larson and i endured the same mfa program, funny enough.

“love at thirty-two degrees” has been a Longtime favorite of mine; new favorites from the whole book are “statuary” and “grandfather outside”

[John Kameas · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Crypsis for the way that things are hidden.
How certain small truths disappear against
a larger truth.
~
That’s crypsis—
everything against intrinsic terrain dissolves in it.
Mimicry is different. It’s you stroking my throat
as if I’m a bird. It’s me pretending in your arms to be a bird.
I am not a bird.
~
The way I can see you when you are shining.
Our roots crypsis, our wings mimicry."

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such quiet and tender poems.

Some of my favorite moments:

I know I’m still alive because I love
to eat.

There are days that walk through me
and I cannot hold them.

Shops fill and empty like lungs—

There is a danger
in making suffering beautiful.

Maybe tonight he’ll bless me. With a simple gift, one a ghost could
give.

All living is brushwork, you say.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these poems. I especially loved a couple of her turns of phrase: “tiny torn tufts.” Ah…. This woman who is both scientist and poet brings a synthesis that really sings (at least to me). Her words illuminate and educate. I loved it.

[Zsofi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was only few poems in and am already transported into worlds that give my brain space to spread their wings in the imaginative, in landscapes of grey coastal waves, of paintings I have brought myself up on, of human nature and death.

[Tia]

Wtf did I just read?
No honestly. Is this poetry? I am gonna take a safe guess & assume I don't know anything about poetry because nothing else explains why ppl loved this and I am still tryna figure my way around this.


DNFd

Maybe sometime later I'll pickit up again

[Raven]

"And memory/
which outruns the body and/
grief which arrests it."

"There are days that walk through me/
and I cannot hold them."

"Forgive me this old habit. There is a danger/
in making suffering beautiful."

"Either everything's sublime or nothing is."

[Ksenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some hard-hitters in this collection and the introduction by Louise Glück is predictably brilliant but in all honesty, I find myself exhausted and borderline exasperated by this specific brand of American poetic tourism.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

caterpillars / have turned the fruit trees / into body bags

What makes stars shiver in their / burning coats? / Love, the rain here / stains sundials all night.