The Mysteries

“Kathryn T. S. Bass invites us back into the realm of childhood, not as we remember it, but as it felt to be there. With compelling beauty, she leads us through realms of hope, uncertainty ,and loss. Poem by poem, she cracks fresh mysteries open, and we’re drawn deeper in, reawakening to the world as it is—confusing, complex, ever-changing, miraculous.”

 —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of Holding Three Things at Once and Intimate Landscape

“Kathryn T. S. Bass's The Mysteries is no ordinary collection of poems. It has a quiet but revelatory way of regarding the world in which everyday objects acquire a lyrical power. An old suitcase exhales decades of desire. A small kitchen cactus becomes a prickly totem of endurance. Luminous and illuminating, her poems connect the visible and invisible realms of experience."

—Dana Gioia, award-winning poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

“As do the crows she evokes in this collection, Kathryn T. S. Bass’s poems “Appraise the world with one eye, then the other.” Her range of subject and voice give the collection its energy and movement, its sting and its comfort. Through it run the measured cadences, the tension between balance and spilling out, the careful touches of a poet who knows her line and language well.”    

—Chris Ransick, author of Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams and former Denver Poet Laureate

“Kathryn Bass’s poetry places the reader in the center of the human experience. Her voice is vulnerable and surprising. The Mysteries lures us in with its beauty, and offers us hope: “tomorrow is a lake / that will shine for us,/an ocean that will rock us,/ a river that will carry us / fast and full with rain.” Bass brings clarity to the concept that all things belong together.”

—Leah Maines, poet and author of the regional bestseller Looking to the East with Western Eyes, among others