Poet and Author Josie Kearns
November 2, 2001
Audio:
A University of Michigan Writing Instructor, Josie Kearns is the author of Life After the Line (Wayne State University Press, 1990), and New Numbers (Western Michigan University Press, 2000), and editor of New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry (Wayne State University Press, 2000).
Of New Numbers, Keith Taylor says: "The title poem begins with an epigraph apparently spoken by a scientist who was trying to explain the term overkill to a congressional committee: 'We need new numbers for this.' Kearns then begins looking for those new numbers, the ones that might fit situations that fall outside our usual patterns of quantification. She even gives these numbers names, and those names in her table of contents create their own weirdly beautiful catalog: Sping, Clazura, Quaro, Endearth, Eenum, Lumaroon, Leethum. And then she gives these numbers their situations. 'Sping,' for instance:"
"Is the straw
and the camel and its back
and the last haystack in which
the poison needle is found."Ann Arbor Observer, 2000