Stefanie Kirby | Glass Poetry Press

Stefanie Kirby (Opening) is the author of Fruitful (Driftwood Press, 2024), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest, and Remainder (Bull City Press, 2025). Her poetry appears in Best of the Net, West Branch, Pleiades, Sixth Finch, Massachusetts Review, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She lives along Colorado's Front Range with her family.

Stefanie Kirby's Opening speaks unsentimentally to the horror and grief related to miscarriage and stillbirth, instead reveling in the almost-fantastical rituals of the mind and body undergoing such experiences. Each poem is locked in its tiny little box, as if the poem is one place that even absence might not escape. Under pressures of form, Kirby's vivid and sensuous descriptions of loss and longing are even more haunting for what they cannot control. The tension between the living and the dead, thin as a uterine wall. In the "smaller field" of a poem, unlike that of the body, "there's no limit to all / it can hold." A poem can never be emptied, though it too is inhabited by the deaths it births. How else to attend to the memory of that which has little trace? The brevity of Kirby's collection thus brilliantly reflects the brevity of a life unlived. Each poem, brief as a breath, and as wondrous.

— Chelsea Dingman, author of Through a Small Ghost