The poems in Kay Cosgrove's first collection,
Anybody Home?
are driven by curiosity - about herself, the world, and her place in it. Witty and elegantly restrained, they ask the question: how do we live the lives we've made for ourselves? Cosgrove roams from barrooms to checkout lines to the enigma of motherhood; she is a teenager responsible for a sack-of-flour-as-a-baby, and then an adult driving a teenage babysitter home. She explores the texture of our connections to strangers, family, ourselves, and illuminates the sublime in the unimportant. The poems in
embrace life's sweetness and shadows. Here, the ordinary is unfathomable and the ineffable is ordinary.
At dusk last night I blew the biggest bubblefor my girls. It captured everything:the black shutters and dead-headed geraniums,
two cars and two girls and a skinny manpulling weeds - all of itso hard to see
except when it floatsin a crystal ballright before your eye.
Excerpt from "God's Law is not Fully Knowable to Human Beings, Thomas Aquinas Wrote" by Kay Cosgrove