New Numbers
$12.00 paper | 57 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-932826-93-0
Publication Date: April 2000
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These poems step forth with their eyes closed, trust that some soil will support their weight. Josie Kearns begins where language leaves off – this is not whimsical reinventions but a strong case for extension that flowers from need. The poet finds both ease and struggle in the infinite; her lines push through their landscapes as if the air will both carry and resist them. This understanding of the nature of things makes Kearns’ poetry so gently balanced, so willing to let life maneuver itself through the clutter. Her poems have a clairvoyant quality; she is one of the “messengers between worlds,” the medium for what, until now, was nameless.
“Josie Kearns brings a fresh sensibility and intelligence to contemporary poetry. New Numbers offers delightful insights into nothing less than the nature of What Is. The quality of imagination here is truly singular; the poems have a beautiful oddity and that is the rarest quality in poetry today. Fictional numbers with names like ‘leethum,’ ‘quaro,’ ‘sping,’ and ‘eenum’ become metaphors for indeterminacy, the unknown, the last straw, apocalypse and excess. At once playful and wise, uncanny and tough-minded, these poems will expand your sense of the world’s harmonics.”
—Alice Fulton
“Ms. Kearns delivers, in New Numbers, the precise and redemptive math of language. Against the disorderly figures of life as we know it, these poems tender a parallel universe–well reckoned, finely tuned, told truly–of incalculable gifts.”
—Thomas Lynch
Josie Kearns
The poems of Josie Kearns have appeared in The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest Passages North, and have been widely anthologized elsewhere. Her first book, Life After the Line(nonfiction), was published by Wayne State University Press. She has been awarded grants from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, the Cowden Fellowship, three Hopwood Awards from the Jules and Avery Hopwood Foundation, and the first MacLeod-Grobe Prize from Poetry Northwest. She has been a soda jerk, reporter, factory worker, and grants writer, and currently teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
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