The Alphabet Not Unlike the World - Paperback

by Katrina Vandenberg (Author)

In her highly ambitious second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg takes her inspiration from the alphabet.

A meditation on the hump of a camel, and what it hides. A reminder that tomatoes belong to the nightshade family, and a vision of the plant as Adam's downfall. The Book of Kells, gold-leafed and extravagantly decorated by monks. Titled for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, these poems are richly grounded in objects both humble and exotic. Vandenberg explores the intersection of power and forgiveness, and deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in emotionally poignant ways. "What will protect us?" one poem asks. "The words will be our weapons. In the end."

Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World unearths meaning--with astonishing beauty--from the pain of loss and separation.

Front Jacket

Praise for The Alphabet Not Unlike the World

"Katrina Vandenberg recognizes the alphabet as a site where the global and the local join, where history becomes the present moment, where history has moment, is momentous. In these poems, 'seeing is not the same / as seeing through, ' but both occur, guided by the double recognition of the alphabet as both medium and message. These poems live near enough to 'the house of the unsaid' that when in one of them the first person invites the second to 'tell me if you want me to stop, ' a reader may say, as I did out loud, Not yet. Please, not yet."
--H. L. Hix

"A stranger pays your bar tab out of pity; the inmate--seeking approval--changes his tune year after year; a saint stands still enough for birds to nest in his hand: these poems take us to the profane, to shed light on the tenuous sacred. Vandenberg's prosodic gift takes us to the breezy edge of the line. In traditional forms like the ghazal, witty alphabet poems, and cyclonic, free verse, she reminds us that truth already is slant, 'Hell is holding onto a secret, some of us already know.'" --Kristin Naca

"A deeply confident, compelling voice, with strong music, originality, and flow. I wanted to go wherever it went. Passionate with a keen sense of surprise, these poems are funny, serious, and wise all at once. Bravo."
--Naomi Shihab Nye

"Vandenberg fills her hands with the world and offers it to us in a gleaming, dripping plenty: a love letter to letters, an omnibus inventory of signs, symbols, and gestures, a guileless gift of all the things she loves, knows, and feels."
--Todd Boss

"I had meant to read a few poems, then return to the book another time. Two hours later I put it down, shaken and exhilarated. It careens between heartbreak and breakthrough in ways that began by amazing me and finished by moving me to the point where I had no choice but to agree when Vandenberg writes in the book's last poem, 'You can't, in the end/close the book.'"
--Jim Moore

Katrina Vandenberg is the author of Atlas, and co-author of the chapbook On Marriage. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Author Biography

Katrina Vandenberg is the co-author, with Todd Boss, of the chapbook entitled On Marriage (Red Dragonfly Press, 2008), and the author of the poetry collection Atlas (Milkweed Editions, 2004). Her poems and essays have appeared in the American Scholar, Post Road Magazine, Orion Magazine, the Iowa Review, and other magazines. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bush Artist Fellowship, a Loft-McKnight Award in Poetry, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference. In 2008-09, she was the resident fellow at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, Massachusetts. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with her husband, the novelist John Reimringer.