Poetry. In her sixth collection, Alyse Knorr open our daily reality like a flower, one whose scent is elusive and complex, but powerful. Insight, humor, courage, and originality transform the inner space of each poem with deceptive simplicity as Knorr asks existential questions of the tiniest concrete details and demands love in return from the vast and terrifying universe which threatens, at times, to swamp our meager human perception. Loss coexists here with delight, pleasure with emptiness, and her mischievously tidy-looking poems spin the reader and set us down in an altered state, one where we suddenly believe that all is unified, that we all belong.
Graham Faust says her work is "situated at the crossroads of Lorine Niedecker's sharp Wisconsin chiseling and Walt Whitman's expansive New York groove," and that Knorr has created "a Baedeker for a life of love, loss, and loose ends, a life that's-let's face it, bravely-at once hers and for all. These poems are genuine and generous, human and humorous. They dare to glow."
Says Stefania Heim, "Every Last Thing thrills between constraint and abandon, 'small hungry words' and 'limitless want.' Sound compels these lines forward across scattered caesuras and attenuated grammar in Alyse Knorr's singular prosody. Not even the couplets or tercets are entirely familiar and yet these poems come together with profound existential order ('not a dreamline but a plot'). Knorr asks the totally ordinary, not at all ordinary question: what makes a life? And as a reader I, too, 'am stilled by this / bombardment' of accidents, memory's artifacts, life in relation-it is achingly beautiful. This book reminds me what poetry is for. As Knorr says, 'a soft song that / if I could write this down / would explain it all at once.'"
