Love and Kumquats
New and Selected Poems
by Kathi Wolfe
“Humor is a rare quality anywhere but even more so in poetry. In this case, Kathi Wolfe’s Love & Kumquats has not only wit but also compassionate honesty in spades. We meet not only a very uppity blind girl who has quite a way with the ladies, but also Helen Keller herself who is recast in wholly different ways than The Miracle Worker would have you believe. Then Wolfe’s father suddenly reappears after four decades of being dead, and even God scores a horoscope poem! Wolfe takes many of the clichés and stereotypes surrounding blindness and flips the bird on each one of them with killer laugh-out-loud lines and a coy smile. Love & Kumquats isn’t just crip lit at its finest; it’s also crip wit at its whip-cracking best.” —Raymond Luczak, author of Flannelwood and A Babble of Objects
“Kathi Wolfe’s poetry navigates loss after loss, complex joy after complex joy, and comes out rinsed clean, with language as sharp as a new blade. There is a whiff of Frank O’Hara, a taste of Carolyn Kizer in these sly and sweet-tart pages, but Wolfe’s slant is all her own — a combination of playfulness and yearning that will sometimes make you laugh, sometimes make you cry, and always make you think. A bravura collection.” — Rose Solari, author of The Last Girl (poems) and A Secret Woman (novel)
“A funny poet is a rare thing, but Kathi Wolfe can also crack your heart wide open. What is it to be a bad-ass ‘blindista’’? The sun will ‘taste like red velvet cake’, and you will love feisty forties women, and you will learn the implacable power of loss and the strange grace of being inside Kathi Wolfe’s quirky, generous, fearless mind. These poems made me laugh and pause and feel as if I was curled up in my favorite armchair with—yes, a luxurious platter of love and kumquats. I have so many lines I want to quote, but how about this one: ‘The night you haunt my house/I dream of baboons and periwnkles.’ Who could resist a poet who begins like that? How lucky we are to have the new and selected poems of Kathi Wolfe.” —Sheila Black, co-author of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability
What Readers Are Saying…
“Just read this fab book. Wow, can you write. The Saphic side of the street and never wanted to move…smart or what?!” – Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER), Maryland
Published September 1, 2019
Paperback | $17.00 USD
BrickHouse Books 