Navigate

Book excerpt: In her second volume of poetry, Karin Schimke explores the idea of home, contemplating notions of belonging and un-belonging and the various places and ways in which one is “at home”. With her characteristic lyricism, Schimke questions the poet’s right or duty to speak, while delivering a meditation on love in all its cruel, gleaming facets, as she traces her own psychic constellations back into the blistering orbit of her father. Drawing from the blood and milk of memory, in symphonic shifts of language, her poems are as forgiving as they are furious, summoning both the elemental and the numinous in a masterful painting of the relationship between people and the natural world. Traversing the haunted landscapes of the past and present, the political and the personal, Navigate is a psalm, startling in its honesty, unforgettable in its beauty.