Poetry. Botkin examines questions of mortality, consciousness, and the concept of self. Although sometimes metaphysical, this subject matter doesn't alienate the reader because Botkin's clear, focused craft shapes her subject matter into a very natural-feeling art. Memories start as solid events and become fragmented over time; Botkin takes those fragments and creates a luminous image of what was once whole. Nancy Botkin's poems have appeared in numerous journals, and her chapbook, Signs of Life, was published by No Exit Press in 1999. Nancy lives in South Bend, Indiana, with her husband and teaches freshman composition and creative writing at Indiana University South Bend.

Parts That Were Once Whole

Literature & Fiction

Botkin, Nancy

Poetry

Mayapple Press

<p>Poetry. There is something wondrously imponderable about the title of Nancy Botkin's latest poetry collection: the next infinity. What would that be like, the something that comes after everything? After negotiating one's way through religion, through the legacy and loss of parents, through a past receding "small and dim" as the memories of scratchy songs on an AM car radio, through moments fleeting like "ice cream melting faster than we could eat it."</p>
<p>At another point she observes, "I'm starting to wonder if I'm in this poem / all by myself." A bit later, in the same poem, she asks "if we are keepers of our own asylum." By unpacking the experience of radical isolation in such unflinching terms, Botkins reveals how we are each our own infinity. And because we share this, we are not so alone after all. It's a lot to think about, and at times she acts as if she'd rather not: "My brain is even less inviting / when it's wild with dark birds flitting / through its spangled hallways." Perhaps less inviting to Botkin, but it is a blessing to her readers who join with those birds flitting through the hallway of her rich imagination. The final image of the book is a cosmic parlor trick, and perhaps that is all life is. And if so, these poems assure us, that's enough.</p>

The Next Infinity

Broadstone Books

The Honeycomb

Steel Toe Books

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Books by Botkin, Nancy