The divide between poetry and prose blurs in this collection of personal meditations, which are connected by a heightened sense of place and space: "Sometimes the landscape settles inside you and makes room for nothing else." Kitchen (co-editor of In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction) practices a sort of literary feng shui, as the words find their own pattern and pool together in sentences of occasional beauty, but more often, a sprightly vagueness. She paints a small picture of Ireland, for example, that leaves us with an uninhabited framework of a sentence: "Its people worked and sang and prayed and learned to live with absence." The prettiness replaces substantive observation. Still, she can hit lovely, resonant notes when she anchors herself in one spot: "What is it we think no one sees that is evident to everyone but ourselves? ...Maybe it's the rough sole of the bare feet I tried too late to scrub each time I went into labor. The rough sole gone deep until it is part of personality." With an agile style and a wide range of reference and experience, Kitchen creates interesting moments, but the links between them are large, uncomfortable ideas that declare themselves rather than persuade: " The day is ahead of us, filling the spaces on the map with the solitary knock-knock of a woodpecker, the maybe of a deer come down to drink, thick deciduous forest that seems, the deeper we go, to open itself to our secrets. It all moved back toward metaphor." Alternately rewarding and frustrating, Kitchen's essays are too tender to leave us completely unmoved, but too disembodied to fully engage us. (Sept.)
