Home (Paperback or Softback)

If poets are historians of the present, Kim Malinowski proves this true with her debut poetry collection, Home. The everyday is made manifest with personal impact and lyricism by a poet who notices everything—then makes it permanent in passing. It’s not often we find a perfect blend of classical understanding with popular consciousness—that’s what makes these poems delicious and impossible to put down.

—Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

Home is a lyric journey through love, loss, and celebration. The narrator sets forth (“Will the wind still convey the scent of lilacs and whisper my name?”), expresses love, as in “Grandma Lillian” (“never without melody”), moves freely into the imaginative realm, as in “Goddess” (“I think that I’m most like Nut, / starlight and magic”), and experiences turning points, as in “Atheneum.” The final sequence, titled “If Comets Were Tears,” an homage to a beloved soul, concludes this beautifully-written, versatile collection: “And I would dance beneath the canopy of the heavens—knowing I would be reunited, and that my star pen would write a galaxy’s worth of words. . .”

—Lisa Bellamy, Pushcart Prize Recipient

Home is thoughtful, compassionate, contemplative, wise, and witty. This collection shows careful attention to its themes of transformation, love, family, and nature. Poems from the epilogue of “Sunset” and Rilke’s words “. . .your life is a stone in you, and, the next, a star.” Beginning with “Home,” the title poem, with its lilac root readied for transplant that represents connection to both our human and our physical worlds, Malinowski subtly presents connections as stealthily as Hansel and Gretel strew crumbs. The poet’s subject is the earth and wider universe and how both can heal, and how living and healing in this world are hard-won. Language, nature, stars, and sometimes magic are things that can rescue. “Today I read a word, / Tomorrow I will choose another,” in “The Poet,” illustrates the complicated intertwining of creating art and living a life. The use of mythology, fairy tales, and pantheistic credos make for a rich mix that shakes up our ideas.

—Gail Galloway Adams, Flannery O’Connor Award Recipient