If Not These Things

Kenneth Chamlee’s If Not These Things embodies some of the most precise and detailed sentences that I’ve read, in poems of constant discovery and nuance. You can feel the poet’s mind here, flying over this book’s landscape like the shadow of a flock of birds. Words are like atoms, the more pressure you put them under, the more radioactive they become. These poems hide their labor and assimilate into the reader “just as seamless as you please,” but every reader that encounters them will “drift forward, without knowing why” to the next poem, their minds flecked with images that they cannot forget.
—Keith Flynn, author of The Skin of Meaning and editor of The Asheville Poetry Review

In his wonderful new collection, Ken Chamlee asks the enormous questions, chief among them: What is it like, and what is the human cost, to tread on this mysterious earth? Indeed, so many of these marvelous poems are rooted in the natural world—a world capricious with dreams, imminent danger, and wild epiphanies. Nothing escapes the poet’s soulful gaze, from the infinitesimal to the grand. In an early poem in If Not These Things, the speaker elegantly inquires: “Can any poem endure / like an ambered ant’s / clear vesture?” Chamlee then goes on, poem after memorable poem, to answer unequivocally, resoundingly, Yes.
—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012–14), author of Light at the Seam

A clear and tender eye for unexpected correspondences which rise, like whales in suburban lawns, from the quotidian, is what Kenneth Chamlee’s If Not These Things offers. The poems begin with a vision of the jet stream dipping “down like a gourd, ladling away summer” and go on to find and make meaning in the singular, familiar moments which define every life: sounds of a mysterious animal giving birth in the attic, an elusive pinata, a walk with the dog, the strange dreams which haunt a couple denied children. “And if not these things,” the poet asks, “then what / is one day in all / your life?” What indeed?
—Catherine Carter, author of Larvae of the Nearest Stars