Hard Proof

Poetry. HARD PROOF is a poetic investigation. These poems invite the reader to sit awhile in thwarted desire and fulfilled desire. In remorse and acceptance. In the body. Professional mourners, seascapes, landscapes, biblical figures, femininity, and metapoetry cohabit these pages in a union that is by turns harmonious and hostile. But all images contained in the poems may be treated as evidence of some kind of love. If the book itself is the accumulation of such evidence, it is by its own criteria conclusive, uncontestable, hard proof.

"Molly Kirchner has a keen ear both for spontaneous American idioms and for the elemental sounds of language itself. She also has a sharp eye both for the significant human gesture—legs hanging off a pier, a hair tucked behind an ear—and for the details of the nonhuman world, some of which are big as the sky in summer, some small, yet all somehow human gestures, too, as when ’the white pines’ five-needled fascicles / dangle as if from the wrists of hands waiting to be / kissed.’ Reality is always, everywhere, and free—as this poet tells us, ’You’re lucky. It’s enough. / You don’t have to deserve it.’"—Christopher Collins