The Unreliable Tree

"Kahn speaks for our time, making full use of all the traditions of poetry, but the poems are the products of a completely unique sensibility. These poems are full of suggestion and mystery, full of strong music and vivid imagery I have never read this kind of poetry before, and my life would be lesser if I never had." - Laura Kasischke, author of Lightning Falls in Love

"Amidst blackberries, barns, bats, and low tides, at dead ends and ditches and traffic lights, Margot Kahn pays attention, asserts, 'I like that I'm a woman who can still / be curious when she turns a corner.' This is a controlled, compressed, lyrical collection of couplets and beautiful diction, of rhythmic syntax - a collection of body and time and the natural world. The Unreliable Tree also acknowledges a held history of the Holocaust, ancestors who survived, who created the legacy of this poet, who claims, 'My whole life I've wanted // to be that girl - plated, chained, impenetrable. / To take the field first, to reveal myself later.' You'll want to read and reread these poems of motherhood and marriage, of desire and inquiry, poems that invite you to find 'solution to dissolution: / alight in the places that will hold you. / Pass through darkness / with the swiftest grace." - Ellen Bass, author of Indigo