Kara van de Graaf is a poet, teacher, and editor living in Salt Lake City, Utah. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was a Chancellor’s Fellow and a Distinguished Dissertation Fellow, an MFA in Writing from University of Pittsburgh, where she was a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow, and a BA in English from Purdue University. Currently, she serves as Assistant Professor of English at Utah Valley University.
Her first collection of poems, Spitting Image (SIU Press, 2018), won the Crab Orchard First Book Prize in Poetry. Individual poems appear widely in national literary journals, including The Southern Review, AGNI, New England Review, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, and the anthology Best New Poets. Other honors include the Hoepfner Award from Southern Humanities Review, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center, the Tennessee Williams Scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and scholarships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and The New York State Summer Writers Institute.
A former poetry editor for Cream City Review, she is currently the editor for Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for poetry in the classroom, which she co-founded in 2015 with the poet Richie Hofmann.
Works
Poem in the Corner of a Young Girl’s Mouth
Poem in the Corner of a Young Girl’s Mouth
That coy meeting which is beginning
and ending all at once, anatomical
oversight, no name for it I know.
What would she sound like? A good girl
speaks only when spoken to, is flat
like a watercolor which means
the light is always hitting the same place
on her hair, her hands are always folded,
like a reflex, as if they are hiding something:
if you can’t say the words, you secret them
into your hand, little whispers she collects
like thread, or fancy buttons
off her mother’s dresses, each one round
as an oyster pearl. Mother says, this
is what ladies know. There is a price
for speaking, for the lips parting. The mouth
has to break every time.
From Spitting Image, originally published in Indiana Review.
La Monstrua Vestida
La Monstrua Vestida
after Juan Carreño de Miranda, 1680
There isn’t room for anything
else: all body, costumed in red,
fabric stretched over wood,
entire width of a canvas.
Only six but she weighs as much
as a full-grown man. Round-bellied,
surly, she is part of a collection
of anomalies, like a pug-faced
dog or a dwarf, a yellow-crowned
parrot, its throat such vivid orange
the court had never seen it before.
In this museum, too, she is an anomaly,
a body I half-recognize as my own,
a familiar I project horror onto
like a mother. Every brush-stroke
threatens to unravel us: where the ribs
of her dress unfasten; where
her pursed lips, almost elegant,
obscure her teeth—stitches pulling
in a seam. Ladies at court couldn’t help
but love her, their figures appearing,
by contrast, that much closer
to perfection. Each hand clasps a globe
of fruit, tinged red where tiny breasts
might be, as though a parody
of the ideal woman. Little jolts
of sweetness she holds onto until
the posing is over and they find
their way into the stomach, that place
where we bury things until they become us.
From Spitting Image, originally published in New England Review.
Sonnet with a Wishbone in the Throat
Sonnet with a Wishbone in the Throat
I trussed the hen and cut the breast
clean, pliable, soft with cartilage.
I thought my mouth could swallow it
whole, but the bone went brittle, broke
through the skin of my neck like two
thorns. Its prongs scissored out above
my clavicle. Windpipe split in a perfect Y.
When I speak, each phrase kaleidoscopes,
modifies, a duet of whispers I lip into air.
I sound sweet when I want to be bitter. I bite
back my anger’s flare. My voice box grows
into an echo chamber, buzzes double-alive.
Forgive me, I must say everything twice:
once to punish, once to entice.
From Spitting Image, originally published in Crazyhorse.
Contrapposto
Contrapposto
Yet it is less the horror than the grace
Which turns the gazer’s spirit into stone…
—“On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery,”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
All day long I touched
the broken faces of men.
I watched their features crumble,
a chevron gone from a lip,
the side of a head smashed off
leaving half a gunshot
eye. Ancients, I have entertained
your arguments and illusions.
I have listened, but I still see
your gods all knocked apart:
divine back to human,
human back to stone.
That night the August heat
conjured an animal stench
in the streets of the old city,
punishing us as we slept
near the cramped window. I dreamed
of our elders’ sick love
of symmetry. Persuaded,
I believed my own face
was remade in stone—cracks
rising up like welts over my jaw.
In the morning I woke and
you found me no longer beautiful.
From Spitting Image.
Bibliography
- Spitting Image, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
