Two of Everything

Praise for Two of Everything “What a marvelous and singular book: of love lyrics, narratives, conversations, fables, aphorisms, abandoned drafts, journal entries of everyday family life, all permeated by the strange and symbolic, all woven together in a beautiful fugue. The mind that moves through these poems, wondering, mourning, treasuring, recording what night says, is precisely the humbly brilliant, attentive, wry, weird friend you wish for in the world, and can only find in true poetry.”—Matthew Zapruder, author of Story of a Poem Praise for River House “No poet of her generation braids passion with intellect more impressively than Sally Keith. And in River House, Keith carries her talent to a whole new level. An elegy for the poet’s mother, River House is also an investigation of how we give our lives meaning and shape. At turns gorgeous, wry, and heartbreaking, these poems render the individual soul with a disarming immediacy. To read River House is to feel grief and bewilderment verging into sheer wonder.”—Peter Campion, author of Other People “Heartbreaking and robust. [. . .] Sally Keith’s poems possess a quiet music, and their intricate scatters of thought bear witness to the intimate struggles of mourning.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “River because we are moving inexorably forward; house because we are locked forever to the past. Preternaturally calm even as they twist and turn against themselves, the sixty-three poems of River House feel as if they’re happening in the time it takes to read them, except that when you’re finished with River House, your dream comes true: you can read the poems again. I do not know of a book of poems that embodies more heartbreakingly or more intelligently the experience of irreconcilable loss.”—James Longenbach, author of forever “Extraordinary [. . .] The poems focus the reader with a hunger so intelligent, so real, and so immediate, you forget you’re reading a poem. It’s like looking at the moon while watching the stars disappear: don’t you look harder? These poems are clear and strange. They illuminate without consolation. The world has ended many times in our contemporary literary landscape, but rarely has it started over with such agility, economy, and elegance.”—Katie Peterson, author of Fog and Smoke “Honest [. . .] Striking [. . .] I’m mourning with the speaker, each poem somehow more shattering than the one previous.”—Coal Hill Review