Desiring Map

Author: Megan Kaminski 

Publisher: Coconut Books (2012)

"The body 'being' in sun, the gaze at rain, teleology inside the house—with these strokes and compasses, Megan Kaminski deftly configures a desiring map, across seacoasts and Kansas plains, through leaves, roots, movements of light. Here a quieter but not quietist America emerges where life's precarity holds—there is a relation between the natural world and neural capacity—as we are pulled into syntax's own search and quizzicality, its seeking to find a place for the I that only momentarily settles before it dislodges again, uncovering questions, finding parts of speech or weeds that answer. 'Speech lies in the break on the river edge,' the poem says: 'subtle splendor.'"

–Erin Mouré

"Megan Kaminski's book is hauntingly quiet, but not silent, just as 'teleology is not silent.' The book is in some ways the teleology of imagism, realizing itself late in history and bursting into jagged pieces, having been dragged through 'some saffron metropolis' and the long summer of the great plains. It is a book that approaches us cannily, drenched in form, never word-spent and never without cocktails; a 21st century pleasure with a keen eye on the terrain and something to say."

–Joshua Clover

"One of the best books I've read this year, Megan Kaminski's Desiring Map melds landscape to mind-to heart-to breath-with some of the most subtly effective melopoeia I've ever encountered in any book of poems. Use it as a dowsing rod, as I've been doing, to find the brain's poetic reuptake pump, and to get it moving again."—

–Joseph Massey