My Archipelago

Kathryn Rantala’s most recent volume of poetry, My Archipelago, is a collection of experimental short poems of musicality and quietude, though an uncloistered quiet, despite the presence of a nun making whiskey at a still in the opening piece. These short bursts of lyrical sound and fragmented images create a wholeness with an implicit, intuitive narrative whose meaning may not necessarily be apparent while they sing to you, but which, all together, describe a world of variety within her mind’s archipelago--nodding its thanks throughout to Wallace Stevens and Gerard Manley Hopkins.