Dear Inheritors

Dear Inheritors

by Kathy Engel

Dear Inheritors is written for you—regardless of your politics, race, or class. At once tender and brutally honest, Kathy Engel’s poetic letter to her readers reveals the everyday “hurricane” that lives “under the belly of the good life”—unnamed inequities, the “tattoo of two worlds divided by train tracks,” witness masquerading as activism. But the same poems that indict, also console, encourage us. Yes, we “live inside contradictions,” still we are learning “who can we keep alive” and what a “do-over” might look like. Part metaphor, part instructions for repair, Engel’s collection taunts us, lyrics us—ultimately, heals us. 

—Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate

Kathy Engel stands open, vulnerable, in a vast world “Where the mirror is confused[.]” and does not flinch. She refuses her own world’s “thousand masks” of denial, even when anguish or privilege tempt or obfuscate.  Her lyricism and her direct speech live among tables, blessing bowls, and gardens; horses, wild birds, and public art; “spit, paste, memory, hammer;” and always the sea, her beloved Atlantic where the waters live and where she physically tunes her attention to far songs. Engel wears a mantle of poet-citizen lightly but authentically, bearing a decades-rich devotion to and work inside literary and social justice communities.  Who dares to sing of “we” or “us” while inhabiting a place “where land stays stolen/swollen?” This book declares “we are more than the names/of places, more than lists—” and it lives there/here at soul-level.  Engel’s clarity and conscience also embrace a tender mortality— “even when the severing is slow[.]” Dear Inheritors addresses populi.      Judith Vollmer is the author of six books of poetry, including most recently The Sound Boat: New & Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin 2022). 

Audre Lorde once asked "where is true history written, except in the poems?" In Dear Inheritors we experience the interconnected love-scale of a being committed to beauty in the form of freedom for all oppressed people, accountability in the form of interspecies presence, and grace in the form of ongoing witness, whether witnessing a mimosa tree in the yard, a loved one, the ebbs and flows of a movement or the porous self, transformed by all of it.  This book will help you remember how to be here, lovingly, curiously inside whichever indescribable moment you face."   

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, PhD,  is the author of six books including most recently Undrowned (AK Press, 2020). 

"Dear Inheritors" moves from the intimacy of home and family to community to social movement, to other countries, back to dirt, river birch and sycamore, to the sea. Opening with the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, looking back to childhood awakenings, the poems work against linear chronology, raising questions of responsibility and culpability, leaning into the spiritual, a world of question.

About the Author

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎  Get Fresh Books, (2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 94 pages
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8218404475