One Girl Babylon

Author: Ruth Ellen Kocher

Publisher: New Issues Poetry & Prose (2003)

“This versatile poet blinks at nothing under the stars. Speaking and singing in the many voices and key signatures of poetry, our primal human language, Ruth Ellen Kocher shines and sheds visible and audible light. And to darkness and ignorance, light is still spiritual Kryptonite.”

–Al Young

“One Girl Babylon takes us from the great human luxury of a moment in which we ‘know her hips / walk on water’ to the unmitigated and also human corruption of ‘the indifference of urban seasons,’ delivering us to ourselves—humans weary from understanding, weary from understanding that is so close but which we keep from each other in so many ways, in so many words. The speaker in these poems wears us out and is worn out—we reach to each other, and this is the fine sensibility of these poems: we reach and almost save each other. That is their moment. Reader and speaker, we are ready to work, but too late. The work of the salvation shown to us here is not in doing, but in undoing what has been done. We serve these poems best by listening, as they have listened to us.”

–Alberto Ríos