Flotsam

Catherine Kyle has crafted a poetic world filled with magical realism, in a traditional and non-traditional sense. The lyrics in Flotsam are imbued with spells. She invokes the ocean, ships, and urban and rural villages to craft a modern fairy tale. This is a chapbook that explores unconscious and conscious desires. Kyle expertly wields vivid imagery, lovely rhythms, textured verbs and taut metaphors. This chapbook explores the idea that “the line between flotsam and jetsam is want.” We learn that “humans distinguish the things waves do not.” By the end, Flotsam takes readers through the waters, across landscapes real and imagined to transform us until “we have become / the forest itself.”