Daphne

Author: Kristen Case

Publisher: Tupelo Books (2025)

Daphne is a meditation on the centrality of predation to the Western lyric tradition. The book is punctuated by lyric essays which circle obsessively around questions of what knowing is, what is possible to know with certainty, and whether it is possible to know another person. The poems and lyric essays in this collection are in dialogue with poems about Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Wyatt’s sonnet “Whoso List to Hunt.” Taken together, these works interrogate the ways violence both disrupts and enables our ways of knowing one another, placed in counterpoint to a recurring refrain signalling the possibility of a non-predatory desire.