Corpse Pose, by Kate Kadleck

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Corpse Pose is a debut chapbook of poems that dance and dissect, that darken and shimmer. In this mini collection, the author welcomes the reader into a world of ghosts and lip gloss, a domestic landscape in which the supernatural and the ordinary coexist. Who does memory belong to, and how does it mutate over the course of a life? What is the cost of girlhood, and how does a person survive it? These questions and others swim across the pages as the poet carefully curates language to capture her experience, both universal and particular.

While the poems vary in shape and subject, certain threads bind them together: beauty, loss, grief, objectification, tenderness. The poet deftly experiments with form, employing such structures as the haiku and the abecedarian poem. As a whole, Corpse Pose promises to leave you both rooted and moved, “dazzled and then swiftly / destroyed.”

Kate Kadleck is a writer, marriage and family therapist, and cold brew enthusiast based in Dubuque, Iowa, where she resides with her partner and their two dogs and four chickens. In a past life, she owned a purple drum set and had a hamster named after Amelia Earhart. Her poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in wildscape., Thimble, The Indianapolis Review, The Garlic Press, Tenth Muse, One Hand Clapping, Prairie Margins, and elsewhere.