Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-957746-07-4
p.83
Named a 2024 Finalist for The Lammy Awards in Lesbian Poetry
At the intersections of eco-poetics and queer family-building, Ardor moves across the political and natural landscapes of Alaska, Colorado, and the deep American South. These poems meditate on love and motherhood in the context of environmental crisis, foregrounding the domestic in a quest to continually re-imagine a hopeful future.
PRAISE FOR ARDOR:
"'I was supposed to be wiser,' Alyse Knorr writes in Ardor, her capacious meditation on lesbian love, marriage, motherhood, domesticity, and vocation. Who hasn't felt the same? In this collection, brimming with deftly rendered landscapes, deep reckoning with our zeitgeist, and rich, literary allusions, Knorr's wisdom is continuously revealed through her speaker's questions. This speaker asks, 'What am I minding but stillness? What have I grown except loss?' She asks, 'When did we last surprise each other, in this yard or any other?' She asks, 'What gained and what risked by changing the terms?' And when she asks, "What delights will transfigure you today?," I answer, This book. It seems impossible to read Ardor any way but ardently." Julie Marie Wade, author of When I Was Straight and Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing
"I experience Alyse's poems as meditations in visceral complexity of a teacher's jagged sensual dancing with the L words: language, land, life, lineage, lens, lightyears, lasting, loss, lettuce, luminous, lessons, lesbian, lampoon, longing, limbic, let, love, love, different love, and of course, literature. Vivid and refreshing to read." Judy Grahn, author of The Highest Apple
"Alyse Knorr’s Ardor is without guile. Rarely does one find a poetry of such candor, enthusiasm, and keen compassion. At times funny, at times heartbreaking, the poems remind us that delight, joy, and passion remain ours to claim, to celebrate, even in the face of the dim future we have helped create on this planet. Confronted with the inevitable that at times separates them, the lover and the beloved, the parent and the child, the neighbor and the neighbor, the stranger and the stranger somehow keep and sustain each other. With each book, Alyse Knorr surprises us with a new voice, a new vision, a new possibility for the art of poetry." Eric Pankey, author of Not Yet Transfigured
"Concerned with naming, at once investigative and celebratory, Alyse Knorr’s wonderful fifth collection speaks of queer love and mothering, of a 'world metered in motion, in sound, / constant and enveloping.' Whether the speaker is listening to the archives, debating Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, or charting a personal epistemology of the closet, Knorr’s eye is tender, her voice generous." Siwar Masannat, author of 50 Water Dreams
ALYSE KNORR is an associate professor of English at Regis University and co-editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of the poetry collections Mega-City Redux (2017), Copper Mother (2016), and Annotated Glass (2013); the non-fiction books GoldenEye (2022) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (2016); and four poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, POETRY Magazine, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.