Pub Date: May 27th, 2013
Format: Paperback
Pages: 76
Trim Size: 6″ x 8″
ISBN: 978–0–983547–81–5
Price: $12

In her third book of poems, Kirsten Dierking explores the way our everyday desires shape themselves into the miraculous, like “antlers branched in sprays of bone against the sky.” In selecting Dierking’s work for a McKnight Artist Fellowship, three-time National Book Award finalist Marilyn Nelson wrote, “I found these slight, reticent poems tender and thoughtful. They demonstrate the virtue of withholding, showing that sometimes less is definitely more.” Tether is an exploration of fluid, unseen grace as it manifests around us, building an uncanny and potent now.

Kirsten Dierking’s latest work reveals her sensuous vision of the nature of the living Earth, its waters, its creatures, its landscapes, its people, in a dynamically Finnish manner. In her world, we know that all the Earth lives vibrantly, poignantly, that we touch one another across time and death, that we are centrally connected to the infinite universe in the world we occupy. In images graceful, vulnerable, brave, Kirsten recreates the tender interactions among us, and we all participate in an unflappable, eternal interconnectedness–this is what Tether shares.
-Beth L. Virtanen, Ph.D., President, Finnish North American Literature Association.

These are poems of quiet wisdom and playful insight where “minnows flash” and “frogs stutter / guttural vowels.” Who else would notice in early evening that “Everything / around the lake / assents to silence”? Kirsten Dierking understands, as the best poets do, that she is the instrument upon which time, memory, music—“the sultry breath of the lush world”—work their ways.
-Tim Nolan, author of And Then

Kirsten Dierking is the author of two previous books of poetry: Northern Oracle (Spout Press, 2007) and One Red Eye (Holy Cow! Press). Her poems have been heard on The Writer’s Almanac and have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places and To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present. She is the recipient of a 2010 McKnight Artist Fellowship, a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant for literature, a Loft Literary Center Career Initiative Grant, a SASE/Jerome Grant, and a writing residency at the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts. She teaches humanities courses at Anoka-Ramsey Community College. In 2011, Kirsten received the NEA’s Excellence in the Academy Award for the Art of Teaching, and in 2009 she received the Building Bridges Award in Education from the Islamic Resource Group of Minnesota.

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