The
Caution of Human Gestures, Poems by Ann Keniston
The textures of music
and memory form circles that ripple ever outward in Ann Keniston's first
book, The Caution of Human Gestures.
Keniston is a poet for whom careful craft is a means to subtle
vision, a knowledge that even the smallest of human gestures has larger
resonances both within and outside an individual life.
Sample Poems by Ann Keniston
“Frost speaks of the process of writing poems as starting with
an emotion, the emotion finding a thought, and the thought finding a
word. At every part of this process, Ann Keniston's quiet, passionate,
wonderfully intelligent voice finds a way to give emotion, thought,
and word a quiet gravity and grace that is unique in American poetry.
Keniston is one of the very few poets, like Emily Dickinson, who have
the gift for dramatizing the mind in motion, as opposed to the mind
at rest-these poems are superb exemplars of the mind in motion, in which
transparency of word matches exactly the density of thought and integrity
of emotion.”--Tom Sleigh
“The complex intelligence of these poems lies in their determination
to balance the tumult of pain, physical and emotional, against the deepest
human pleasure, love, and the profound human challenge to '…lay
down/everything except the effort to love.' The triumphs of The
Caution of Human Gestures are hard won, after 'All these years
inside the compulsion/to hurt, be hurt or have been hurt…' Ann
Keniston has found a voice at once piercing and unflinchingly objective.”--Gail
Mazur
“In The Caution of Human Gestures,
Ann Keniston charts the world of spirit to find how it resides, as it
always must, in the world of things. While Keniston acknowledges the
trickster spirit duping us at every turn-'so the joke is funny because
it's wrong: the body isn't what persists'-she also finds the courage
to praise the fleeting nature of the temporal. In her debut collection,
Keniston joins those contemporaries who place their faith in the act
of description itself. Readers will find The Caution of Human Gestures
a welcome journey.”--Claudia Keelan
Ann Keniston's poems have been published in Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan
Quarterly Review, Pequod, Shade, and many other journals; her
essays have appeared in Gettysburg
Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Twice a
recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, she has been a resident
at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation,
and the Ucross Foundation and has received artist's grants from the
Somerville (MA) Arts Council and the Sierra Arts Foundation. She
is also a scholar of contemporary American poetry, with articles published
in Contemporary Literature and several anthologies. She
teaches English and creative writing at the University of Nevada-Reno
and lives in Reno with her husband and two sons.
ISBN 193233971X, 88 pages, $17.00