An Image Not a Book (Free Verse Editions)

An Image Not a Book is an attempt to register "the strain / of assembly," the difficulty of gathering, garlanding, and holding-together while grieving lost companionship. Instead of raging after order, these poems adapt themselves to looser, more tenuous forms of interwovenness. Improvising restless structures that come together, fall apart, then recombine again, An Image Not a Book is an account of relearning how to dwell in this world (the only world there is) in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

What People Are Saying

After great pain, as we've been taught, a formal feeling comes. What is remarkable about Kylan Rice's debut is the sheer stateliness of its cadences, the sober pressure and release of its allegiances. Its allegiances are as much with the heart as with the natural world: of snows and garlandings, of the beach at Nags Head and "ponds / in thickened fields." Rice knows that "looking in" is not quite the same thing as "joining in," yet these are poems of sustained connection. To love is, quite simply, to risk having loved: a truth that blazes across these poems. This book-length ode to human intimacy feels its losses in its pulse-and, through its art and artfulness, its grace and empathy and attention, comes to count even them as gain. -G. C. Waldrep

This meager apocalypse. With this phrase, Kylan Rice prophesies the condition of contemporary catastrophe, whose meagerness consists of disintegration, fragmentation, fissure, fracking, exorcism, deferral. The greedy pursuit of a "usufructed gram of dew." Formally expansive, functionally recursive, An Image Not a Book concerns friendship and climate crisis in equal valences, performing memory as ouroboral recall, predicting structure from its collapse, envisioning transmigration in a hierogametic spore. Rice has written a plaint for the age, one with the shapeshifting structure of a cloud and the exhilaration of a sudden zero. -Peter O'Leary

In dense evocative poetic diction, Kylan Rice maps an uneasy becoming through the work of memory, myth, and writing, which is always tragically entwined with deceit and forgetting. He asks: in this world of fragmentation, how does one keep fidelity to oneself and to those one loves? You will not find a definitive answer here, but instead a continuous stream of questions sketched in philosophical lucidity. Rice mixes beauty and difficulty, a combination so badly needed in twenty-first-century American poetry."-Laura Jaramillo

Kylan Rice is the author of Incryptions, a collection of essays. He is co-author of Primer, a collection of conversations with the poet Dan Beachy-Quick, and co-editor of Southern Lights: 75 Years of the Carolina Quarterly. His poems and essays have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Image, Kenyon Review Online, and West Branch, among others. He is the associate editor for The Missouri Review.