Tourist in the Pure Land

Kate Green's second full-length book of poetry spans thirty years of writing, an accumulation of lyricism layered with wisdom. Her poems illuminate ordinary, broken things, drawing us toward the transcendent in the everyday. She is a native Minnesota poet, and her verse is grounded in that northern realm. But her work is anything but provincial, evoking as it does images and sensations that resonate within us all. Her recollection of her father's mystical quest for the deep-swimming walleyed pike—"monstrous lunkers, dying of old age"—is both amusing and recognizable to anyone with their own obsessions. From lush Caribbean islands to the arid hills of New Mexico to the innermost recesses of her own body, this poet's vibrant voice takes the reader into her own "pure land."
From "Question for the Newborn":
if you think back
maybe it will come to you,
the ecstatic pain of cells dividing,
face coiling out of the brain,
the time in the mothery sea
when the outside of your face
was the same as your mind
and your skin was not a shell
but the inside of a flower
that in turn was a wound
so open we call it human.
Kate Green's poetry has received two Bush Foundation Fellowships in Poetry and a Loft McKnight Award. Her novel Shattered Moon was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. She has published four other mystery novels and eight books for children. She teaches college writing in Minneapolis, Minnesota.