American Mythology

It’s a pleasure to welcome this assured new poetry collection from Raphael Kosek.  Large as its title is—AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY—the poems rise to its challenge.  Whether orchestrating her response to landscapes actual or painted (her startling poems on the work of Georgia O’Keeffe offer a splendid set of meditations on what’s going on in any O’Keeffe painting), or navigating with skill, feeling, and clear-eyed courage the choppy waters of personal relationships, the reader can always trust the authenticity both of thought, observation and feeling.  What I admire throughout, is the sense of urgency under an often deceptively quiet surface, at once absorbed and appalled by the ordinary day.  “Isn’t everything we do serious?” she asks—and these poems acknowledge the truth of this, while remaining light of touch, deft of manner, clean of language, with a ripple of anxious muscle under their skin, so that “truth comes unexpected,”  for it is “truth” she’s after.

—Eamon Grennan, author of THERE NOW

Raphael Kosek’s AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY is a fine debut collection.  The mythology she explores is as much personal as it is national.  In the title poem, she says, “I’ve never been out west / but the frontier is in my bones.”  Kosek assesses her world with a painterly eye.  She writes of the “murderous beauty of bright things” and tells us “the Black Hills are not really black / but green and gray like Cezanne’s mountains.”  Elsewhere, she says, “I want to write the poem . . . that won’t stop bleeding.”  And she has.  Repeatedly.

—Charles Rafferty, author of THE SMOKE OF HORSES

Raphael Helena Kosek investigates sacred spaces in AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY, dismantling domestic landscapes, paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, and archetypes of the western frontier, where buffalo and antelope roam.  As with grace, “The truth comes unexpected,” she reminds us—in the course of finding a missing button, “while washing parsley at the sink,” observing the “stark calligraphy” of crows in flight or hanging a “faded military flag.”  Crisscrossing multiple terrains of heart and imagination, and as declared in “Ars Poetica,” hers are poems “that will break your window.”

—Pauline Uchmanowicz, author of STARFISH