SUTRA PRESS announces the release of Caroline Kessler’s chapbook, Ritual in Blue.

The chapbook marks the third publication from the emergent publisher, which was founded last year to publish emerging writers that hunger for truth and chapbooks that change our lives and wake us up.

Caroline Kessler’s Ritual in Blue is a wandering meditation through the realms of desire and spirituality, in the midst of displacement. Questions of searching, separation, and selfhood permeate the poems, which are rituals in themselves. Not a prescription nor an answer to these questions, the landscape of Ritual in Blue is dotted with bodies of water, spiritual paraphernalia, and the human body.

 

Sample excerpt from “A Study of Inland Waters”

 

please be advised there is always some level of risk
as in picking myself up from the original grass

when swimming in any water body as in saying yes
as in please remove my people-pleasing neuroses

there is often some sunburn to let cool down, the skin
a shell of inherited freckles and histories

please be advised time zones shift when I drift through
them as in drawing from the well of not-knowing

the water’s progress means the same prayer on repeat

 

“The chapbook emerged from my thesis, which I finished in May 2017, as part of my MFA
program in creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis. The chapbook is a distillation
of the thesis, a clarification of many of the ideas, subjects, and themes present in the work I
created over two years, living in St. Louis, writing, teaching, and building a Jewish community
there. In winnowing down the thesis, I felt I was creating an entirely new project, a ritual of
seeing how poems might fit together and talk to each other across the manuscript. ”
—Caroline Kessler

 

Caroline Kessler is a poet, editor, and community builder. Her poetry and prose has been published or is forthcoming in The McNeese Review, The Susquehanna Review, Sundog Lit, Profane, Rivet, Superstition Review, among others. She is the co-creator of The 18 Somethings Project, a virtual writing adventure. She has taught at the Yiddish Book Center and Washington University in St. Louis, where she earned an MFA in Creative Writing. Originally from outside Baltimore, she is living in Jaffa, where she is a 2017-18 Dorot Fellow in Israel and at work on a collection of lyric essays, The Geography Problem.

 

Ritual in Blue is scheduled to be released mid-April.

Ritual in Blue is now available for pre-order at our online store at: sutrapress.com/books. Limited edition saddle-stitched, ~40 pp., ISBN 978-0-9991518-1-5. For more information, email us at editor@sutrapress.com.

 

Caroline Kessler’s cycle Ritual in Blue embraces a lush intelligence—not just the speaker’s, but also the world’s, to which this speaker responds in like register. These are lyrics of sensual philosophy, piercing perception with apprehension without ever sacrificing either body or mind. What does healing mean, or balance, these poems seem to ask, though those words are never used. These poems are citizens of “the most / developed part of the city no one / is born into.”

—G.C. Waldrep, author of Goldbeater’s Skin, Disclamor, and others

 

With subtlety and grace, Caroline Kessler celebrates a woman’s body—its endurance and relentlessness, its strength and limitations—and, above all, the innermost feelings a body holds. Is it the spirit? Is it the divine? This poet seeks answers and will travel—to ancient spaces and to Chava, that mythical first seeker. This poet understands the body won’t last forever. Kessler’s poems ask herself and, essentially, humankind, What to make of our time here? Each poem is a step toward something meaningful and maybe even righteous, “…a movement / to get closer / to what is true.”
—Yona Harvey, author of Hemming the Water

 

Ghosted with song and liturgy, the poems in Caroline Kessler’s energetic chapbook Ritual in Blue are nevertheless rooted in the body, creating potent tension between the poems’ often-intertwined spiritual and physical realms. Here, “palms press blessing[s] into my forehead;” in this chapbook, there is no benediction without touch. Kessler crafts stirring, tumbling poems that connect readers to a divinity too beautifully large for us to catch and keep for ourselves: as with moving water, held and cherished “in the scoop of my dress” only for a moment before we must let it go.

—Rachel Mennies, author of The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, the 2014 winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry.