Stefanie Kirby
ISBN: 978-1-949099-21-8
22 pages


"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

"Stefanie Kirby's chapbook, Opening, will open you like 'a highway,' 'a window,' 'a second mouth / filled with birds,' a cracked landscape. Kirby directly confronts the strange irony of living in a body which 'gives birth to death,' the uncanny after-reality of miscarriage. This is a transformational unfurling through and past the body. Kirby blends the body with the living world until the pain of being alive after a loss sits somewhere in the chest. In these vivid, surreal, and often fabulist poems, 'Drought brings up / shipwrecks like a body emptying itself / of bones.' Every poem aches and burns. 'Mary Magdalene turns / to smoke, bones soft / as incense.' Kirby, a master of the surreal, continually writes the wombed body in revolutionary and enchanting ways. Opening left me open to the bone."

— Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot

You think your body a desert. You choose to be a desert, yet your desert body asks you for a river. This desert demands you make a river from your body. The desert demands you make a river from your body and you respond with sand, and a river. The mouth of the river collects stones and hurls them from its banks, and you build another body from the sand. The body you have built of sand does not fall to the waves. The body falls to the wounds from the hurled stones, which return it to the water. The hurled stones return it, the sand body you built, to the earth beneath the water where it began, once, as stone. The mouth opens. The mouth of the river that you made with your body recoils to swallow the sand body you built, a body wounded by stone. Wounds swallowed, made smooth by water. Smooth as stone beneath the river, still as a body of sand.