"These are lyrics that briefly and beautifully change our view of the world. In this effort, they do a quietly wild, beguilingly sudden work of making us rethink the ordinary before we can help ourselves, followed by the unnerving next part that hits us consequentially--we live in this world they are describing, though we had thought that we understood it perfectly well already. The best in these poems are their smallest moments, but once encountered, smallness means nothing but inspired surprise, as they have the power to alter us with unexpected ease. . . . The poems here, in sum, offer crisp language, language that speaks to new views, felt and therefore inherently worthy ways of reporting, all made forceful by strong and easy narrative guidance. The speaking of these poems throughout, even in their drama, is quiet, making everything that happens all the more unsettling as these ideas reach into us."—

Alberto R?os

Whether

Aligned with the mechanism whereby the spirit is borne aloft through song comes again

the question: whether. And not soothed so much as opened by the boy soprano's Sanctus, what moves

in the mind as the throat constricts in sympathy, one note peeled from the last, fine as paper slipped

from a garlic bulb, veined, translucent, is whether-as if wound through the spiraling

amplitude, purpled, fretted, one voice suspended in concentration of prayer or terror

wills itself above faltering, more perfect since time must soon break it. And made it.

Whether and by whatever impossible arrangement of stars, harmonies, correspondences through which

the music finds the spirit and like a blade slits and releases, circulates the question

through the phrase, the delicate engine-as if it matters: the song rises, everything goes with it.

The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, and memory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary. Finding voice through both lyric and narrative approaches, Gottshall's poems are filled with complex music, unexpected imagery, and the mysterious interplay between the physical world and that of the imagination.

"These are lyrics that briefly and beautifully change our view of the world. In this effort, they do a quietly wild, beguilingly sudden work of making us rethink the ordinary before we can help ourselves, followed by the unnerving next part that hits us consequentially--we live in this world they are describing, though we had thought that we understood it perfectly well already. The best in these poems are their smallest moments, but once encountered, smallness means nothing but inspired surprise, as they have the power to alter us with unexpected ease. . . . The poems here, in sum, offer crisp language, language that speaks to new views, felt and therefore inherently worthy ways of reporting, all made forceful by strong and easy narrative guidance. The speaking of these poems throughout, even in their drama, is quiet, making everything that happens all the more unsettling as these ideas reach into us." --Alberto Rios

WhetherAligned with the mechanismwhereby the spirit is borne aloftthrough song comes againthe question: whether. And not soothedso much as opened by the boysopranoas Sanctus, what movesin the mind as the throat constrictsin sympathy, one note peeledfrom the last, fine as paper slippedfrom a garlic bulb, veined,translucent, is whetheraas ifwound through the spiralingamplitude, purpled, fretted,one voice suspendedin concentration of prayer or terrorwills itself above faltering,more perfect since time mustsoon break it. And made it.Whether and by whatever impossiblearrangement of stars, harmonies,correspondences through whichthe music finds the spirit and likea blade slits and releases,circulates the questionthrough the phrase, the delicateengineaas if it matters: the songrises, everything goes with it.The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, andmemory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary.

understood it perfectly well already.-Albert Rios

KARIN GOTTSHALL was recently writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and in many other publications. She lives in Middlebury, Vermont.