Fiery and fine, Krystal Languell's Call the Catastrophists is a "Whoomp! (There it is)" of a first collection. Amused, bemused, explosive, defused, beautiful, ass-shaking, self-effacing, serious, then distant, then wise, Languell's register-shifting magic in these poems is worth the price of entry. You'll be coming back, though, for the heart. —Ander Monson Krystal Languell traverses memory and desire with a tough-minded concern for language’s (in)ability to mean. Place and language collide, collude, and collapse everywhere, producing subversions of the order/system of all things: catastrophe pervades. Call the Catastrophists interrogates—colloquially, effortlessly—the damage done to us by language. There is perhaps no greater challenge for the poet, and perhaps no better poet to engage it than Languell. —Carmen Giménez Smith Okay, what should I call them? Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk-nyuk. Anything but late for supper! Ah-cha-cha-cha! Krystal Languell’s poems are a lot funnier than those jokes. And sadder. And far more perceptive. And maybe they’re not so much about pulling the rug from under language as they are about getting down on the carpet and helping you to look for your lost contact lens or to scrub up the wine you just spilled. These are poems by a human being who reminds you that there are more of us (from wherever it is we came from) both behind and in front of this book. —Graham Foust What then is a catastrophist? In the cosmography of this incredible first volume, she is a mobile force that screams: There is plenty to say, say it, say it! In the case where it is the critical reality of the daily life of a person, a thinking person, a person with a sex that is not one, with a class not a cache, who bumps against reality being easily bruised, and doing it again, and saying so. Krystal Languell reinscribes poetry to its rightful spot where we begin, and keep beginning, inside our catastrophe, where it lives. —Rachel Levitsky

Call the Catastrophists

Literature & Fiction

Languell, Krystal

Poetry

BlazeVOX Books

Quite Apart asks "what about after survival?" in a chronicle of attempts to have a heart in a rough world. Haunted by work and its wasted hours, the book offers a glimpse of self-rendered as subtext beneath the sheen of productivity. Inventive formal poems provide a kind of alibi, mirroring the inflexibility of the environment--driving through mountains, bleeding in alleys, losing keys in a bar parking lot--to allow some emotion to pass through, tenderness intact. The action among forms of address moves across the sections from direct to readerly, to more distant, back to the last/lost sequence, and ultimately into an intimate direct address, which builds up a reserve of trust adequate to collapse the distance of a cool operator. Mediated by grammatical invention, the collection enacts the making of an authentic place and self, reckoning with difficult truths (failures, omissions) to arrive at a state of peace having weathered some storms. It returns to a core and singular perspective, a knowing eye, that captures absurdity and tragedy, the absurdity of tragedy, to find--beyond vigilance--a balance between acceptance and bucking, which is perhaps another name for love.

Quite Apart: Poems (Akron Series in Poetry)

The University Of Akron Press

Systems Thinking With Flowers

Fonograf Editions

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Books by Languell, Krystal