Sleeping Upside Down

By Kate Lynn Hibbard

Poetry. "Kate Lynn Hibbard's SLEEPING UPSIDE DOWN is a beautiful book of poetry, composed in well-crafted and pleasing cadences, sharing a vision of sexuality extraordinary for both the strong storytelling it inspires, and for a tender intimacy that pervades each strophe like another warm music. In poem after poem, it is a former norm of sexual orientation that is consciously backgrounded a past, "straight" life fraught with the unresolved and repressed and a new, happy and mature lifecelebrated and patiently chronicled in its stead. It is then that the plain sweetness of the everyday returns planting peas for a summer garden, cooking a cranberry chutney, sleeping through a blizzard in late March and all of these shared in the erotics of a woman-to-woman lovingness. What a debut. It was a gift to have read this wonderful book." Garrett Hongo"

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1878851241
• ISBN13: 9781878851246
• Release Date: March 2006
• Publisher: Silverfish Review Press
• Length: 72 Pages

Customer Reviews

a burst of flame in this stunning new voice

Sleeping Upside Down will stun you with its poetic brilliance and raw honesty, its starry adolescent dreams and gritty farm girl observations, its unearthed and pulsing passion. Its carefully constructed lyrical poems weave the narrative threads through gardens and bedrooms and into your heart.

Staying Awake with Sleeping Upside Down

As soon as I began to read this slim, beautifully-bound volume of poems, I realized that I had slipped into a world of honest emotion and brilliant observations. These poems are sensual and soft as a first kiss, hard-edged and raw as the first shuddering sob after a difficult breakup with a lover. Hibbard evokes human sensuality and desire with a deceptive simplicity and clarity; second and third readings create echoes that resonate long after you have put the book down. There are poems here to delight and astonish, not only about love and loss, but about the isolation and joy of farming in the Midwest, about coming to terms with the aftershocks of rape and violence, about being middle-aged and slowly becoming one's mother. Hibbard's eye is acute and wise, her range is broad, and her hopeful vision is grounded in the physical. The title poem is one of the most original and finely detailed poems about nascent desire that I have ever read, and the opening line from "The Trouble with Language," "The trouble with language is / it follows you everywhere," could be said of the poems from this book. I recommend it both for those who already love and appreciate brilliant, well-crafted poetry, and for those who are new to poetry. Both will be more than satisfied.

This is a book of poetry you can't put down!

I read Sleeping Upside Down under a spell of wonder. These poems are accessible but cover complex ground between men and women, women and women, and the writer and her subjects. The title poem is a beautiful coming of age poem in which the narrator describes the electricity between two teen girls on a hot night in the Midwest. Awakening sexuality is made visceral through "[...]ing/as if threaded with wires." The heat and vibrancy inside a young woman's bedroom is in interplay between the dark night outside and "the crackle and hiss of the electric fence on the all night Top 40 radio." This evokes the buzzing and heat present everywhere in pubescent adolescence. Juxtaposed against the energy of desire is a claustrophobic closeness, which captures the discomfort many of us have known when faced with an attraction that can't be expressed. What the narrator is seeking is barely suggested beyond the hint of an open "pajama top," which is remedied by "feigning sleep." The phrase, "sleeping upside down" is a superb use of metaphor for the confusion and worldview changes that occur when people recognize their attraction to the same sex. There is a lot of humor throughout this book as well. In Fever, Hibbard expertly establishes the tensions between lovers about to split up. Certainly the idea of sex with someone we're about to leave is a compelling premise for a poem. While having sex with her male lover for the last time the narrator is distracted: "she noticed things the way she thought a firing squad victim would." The sweating and haze of fever leaves the woman "too witless and weak to argue" and "she felt a great reverence for what the body is still willing to do." Quite the opposite of pathetic, as break-ups can often be, the tone of this poem is hilarious and all too familiar to anyone who tried to leave a relationship gracefully. Buy this book. It is delightful, brilliant, reverent, funny, and original.