The Search Engine

Kathleen Ossip

APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner

Beginning in a high-rise hotel and ending with a quasi-mythic suburban idyll, The Search Engine scans a dissonant, saturated environment. Kathleen Ossip’s poetry is word-rich and music-lush, lively, witty, and sharp. She deftly records the immediacies of life, interior and exterior, domestic and worldly, here and now.

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ISBN: 9780971898110

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9780971898103

Format: Hardcover

Air

If I can’t have you
       (and could if only too)

hunger will the when.
       Treasure still till then

the tender net of strange,
       and rend lamenting change.

The river in the boat
       most simple, most remote

rushed before we knew.
       If I can’t have you

closes now the where
       captivates the dare,

cages tarried why.
       Blend my garden, try.

This singing then what for?
       The door, the door, the door:

The emblem of your eye,
       Elizabethan eye.

About the Author

Kathleen Ossip is the author of three books of poetry: The Do-Over, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2011; and The Search Engine, selected by Derek Walcott for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared widely in such publications as The Washington Post, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The …

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Reviews

“Formal agility plays a fast game of tag with modern urban women’s issues in The Search Engine, the slippery and absolutely contemporary debut from Kathleen Ossip, which slips non sequiturs and famous names (from Woody Allen to the Waldorf) into its sonnets, syllabics, macaronics, and other high-spirited accomplishments, including a Provençal ballade about Plath and Sexton.” —Publishers Weekly

“The poetry of nerves… is self-evidently, truly American, and this poet is a fine recorder of its devastating little complexities… At her acutest she is irresistible.” —Derek Walcott

“Ossip produces poem after poem that showcase a robust energy and freneticism; what’s all the more impressive is, that for all of their sheer ravenousness and ranginess, the poems that populate this book are incredibly pressurized and precise… We are with the speaker and we recognize the speaker’s world as our own, even if we blush a little for not having noticed it this fearfully and lovingly before. We are the richer for The Search Engine, a wonderful first book from a promising, powerful new poet.” —Gulf Coast