Things Are Disappearing Here Pa

Disquieting new work from the winner of the 2001 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Absence and trespass permeate these poems, in which what has just occurred--or what is about to--is as palpable and ominous as it is unrevealed. In Kate Northrop's finely-wrought verse, children have gone missing, sealed-off passages are discovered, and missing dogs emerge like visions before bounding off again. Northrop has a sixth sense for where the mundane and the uncanny pass too close for comfort--and no place more so than in the book's haunted centerpiece, a visceral rendering of a sixteenth-century Hungarian countess with certain insatiable appetites. Gorgeous and strange, "Things Are Disappearing Here" is an imaginative tour-de-force.

Kate Northrop is Associate Professor of English at West Chester University.