Atlas: Poems

By Katrina Vandenberg

"A first book of remarkable talent and depth." --PATTIANN ROGERS

Like Atlas holding up the world, this collection elevates human history--acknowledging and transforming patterns of all kinds through careful attention.

In Atlas, Katrina Vandenberg captures the way events reverberate and repeat across time and place. In the seventeenth century in the Netherlands, as one poem notes, a virus fueled through the tulip trade, making the flowers' veined petals so beautiful the price of bulbs soared; in the twentieth century in the United States, blood tainted with the AIDS virus was inadvertently transfused into the veins of hemophiliacs, eclipsing "the purpose that briefly lit their brilliant veins." In another poem, Vandenberg links an image of her sister, pausing in her work as housekeeper, with the contours of a maid in a Vermeer painting and a woman just "made over" on that day's episode of Oprah.

Like any good atlas, this collection plots intersections: of love, death, history, art, and desire. Carrying lines and themes from one poem to the next, drawing on family artifacts, memory, and imagination, these are poems that build a conversation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1571314199
• ISBN13: 9781571314192
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.4" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful!!

My daughter brought this book of poetry home on a visit and before she even got out of bed the next morning I had pretty much devoured it. I bought three copies - one for me and the other two for friends, who also raved about it. The poems opened me up to emotions I don't usually access very easily and they also awakened my mind to new insights. I am sure I will be coming back to this book many times.

Transcends time while drawing upon personal family artifacts

The debut poetry collection of Katrina Vandenberg employs a language and flair for expression that transcends time while drawing upon personal family artifacts, memories, ideas, and friends. Marrying Late: When I think of what it means not to marry/the high school sweetheart, but to find each other/as we did at ages thirty and forty, I think/of John and I singing along to an old cassette/of Jackson Browne on car trips, and how, as we sing,/a part of me is hearing the song for the first time/in Detroit, on WRIF with my first boyfriend/in his truck as he took curves, shifting hard and fast./And probably John is making love with a black-haired girl/in the carpeted back of his van in 1979, out west,/the cassette new and popular, draining the battery./How unlikely that we ended up traveling together/singing a song we each learned with someone else./Neither of us minds that, the way we might have then.