The Curve of Things

The Curve of Things takes shape in this book—a woman’s full hips but also a rolling mountain, water’s soft bend, or the thrum of Irish immigrants living at the hard edges. With all their music, these poems feast on queer love, mapping loss and liberation, exploring her beloved’s scars, and the knot of kinship that remains even when lovers part. Tragic and tender, The Curve of Things tumbles through the ecstatic joys and difficulties of loving women, celebrating provocatively this long-stretching terrain of desire. These poems choose love over defeat, finding deliciousness in every ache and in every yearning.

Kathy Kremins is a retired New Jersey public school teacher with a BA from the College of St. Elizabeth, an MFA from Goddard College, and a DLitt from Drew University. She has two chapbooks of poems, Seamus & His Smalls (Two Key Customs, 2023) and Undressing the World (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her debut full-length collection, The Curve of Things, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2024. She is also the author of An Ethics of Reading: The Broken Beauties of Toni Morrison, Nawal el Sadaawi, and Arundhati Roy (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010). She is an editor for NJ Audubon Magazine and a member of the feminist poetry collective Write On! Poetry Babes.

from The Curve of Things

China cups, cereal bowls,

a sunflower’s center, your lips on my lips,

a puppy’s head, your lower back,

the mountain’s outline, the stars at night,

a new moon, an old wooden barrel,

your hands cupped, filled with water,

the yellowed pear, the brass doorknob,

the city’s skyline in my rearview mirror,

the brush in my hand, the sleeping cat,

the printed letter G, a slow word,

your breasts in profile, my mouth on your neck,

the silt-rich molehills, a scared possum, 

the crystal goblet half-filled, a globe,

an enjambed line, a lullaby,

a baby’s pout, the geography of your foot.

Mapping

Watching you sleep, moved by the shape of your body,
I wonder about the scars, childhood mishaps
provoked by your endless curiosity, marks
dropped on the surface from chicken pox, faint
as if you have been mapped by drops of soft rain,
and the memorials of love scratches from beloved cats
leaving Hansel-and-Gretel patterns on your hands
that have traced my own scars like reading a book.

Have you felt the tracks of my living in such quiet spaces
when my chest rises and falls against your back
pressing those scars into your sleeping form,
wishing you awake, shaken by the turning of your body?
Pages of braille, mysterious to the unfamiliar fingers,
you translate me into all our languages.

The Curve of Things is honeyed heat and blazing ache. Kathy Kremins queers the natural world in this collection, whispering to a beloved “deeply from long needles” in “Blue Fields” or, in her stunning title poem, mapping lesbian lovemaking such that plants, animals, human touch, and art-making layer within every gesture: “the geography of your foot. . . . / a beagle’s howl, the rabbit’s route, / my breath on your cheek, red, juicy tomatoes, / the binding of a book.” Here the imagination resurrects, intimacy prays in tongues, and poems are palimpsests—holy, elemental. Too, these poems map what canyons us: waving to a father while “blowing kisses in a direction lined with absence,” or, in “About the Sadness,” bearing witness to the torment of an impossible love. Take a breath as you crease the spine of The Curve of Things open: what lies within is breathtaking.
—Darla Himeles, author of Cleave

Kathy Kremins’ debut full-length poetry collection leaves me wet. Wet in my longing to discover all the places and things—“a new moon, an old wooden barrel, / your hands cupped,” wet for what we didn’t know before we knew “the sculptor’s fingers” and “the spotted salamander,” wet for all the geographies the speaker crosses and caresses with unabashed gratitude and grace, wet in my daydreaming of all the ways lovers and family and friends break and bloom in each other’s company like a “blue morning off the foothills / before the sun rises.” Never linear and always loud in its wanderlust, The Curve of Things is a manual for living truth, an unapologetic how-to on loving humanity in all its delicate, delicious, and dissettled forms.
—Marina Carreira, author of Tanto Tanto and Desgraçada

Kathy Kremins is an observer willing to challenge candor in the physical world while working toward and imagining a more equitable future. Like the title poem suggests, The Curve of Things is an inquisitive collection willing to explore epistemic gatherings as well as the ways in which we love, learn, and hold space for one another. From restorative tercets to enjambed backbeats, these poems hold on to light waves and grace the heart with hands delicate enough to hold the beating, the breathing, and the deepest of grooves.
—Attorious Renee Augustin, Education Development Director for Evoluculture Ventures

88 pages
Kathy Kremins
Pub date – May 2024
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN: 978-1-960327-05-5
Emerging Voices in Poetry / Florenz Eisman Memorial Collection