The Kimnama is a masala of history, culture, and personal transformation.  Scene4 Magazine calls it “…a Whitmanesque long poem…[that] makes the reader viscerally smell, hear, touch and see the streets, mosques, gods, vehicles, shopping malls and slums of New Delhi…”

Book Reviews

From The Montserrat Review by Ethan Fischer:

“Lapidary verses vary with brisk evocation of streets, shops, and voices. Roberts devotes her lean book to vast India not only from her vantage point as traveler but from the eyes, ears, and tongues of Indians; their timeless spirit shines despite imperial edicts or raids by sacred cows…Passages echo and resonate as lines twine around streets or recline on roofs or ride camels or eat spicy meals or greet children or trace a god’s smile.”

From The Alsop Review by Cheryl Snell:

“The language throughout is elegant and precise, and the short swinging lines reinforce the idea of passage, for me. Musical repetitions, the use of opposites, and the theme of connection, recall Whitman–especially ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ or ‘Prayer to Columbus.'”

 

Book Excerpt

A fruit market on spindly wooden stand
is built by the side of the road.
Next to the melons,

a barber lifts his knife,
his client’s face
full of white lather.

A clump of laughing women
in a rainbow of saris
crosses the street.

Japanese Maruti vans honk
past ancient Ambassador cabs
built like tanks.

A man clad in a bright pink turban
and an orange scarf
around his neck smiles without teeth.

The market vendor deposits
red onion skins in the gutter
and three cows gather,

push their noses deep in rich reddish-purple,
stopping traffic,
as if they knew they were gods.

A connected series of blank verse sonnets written in the voice of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who led the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition of 1910-1913.  Based on Scott’s actual journals, this book recreates the Heroic Era of polar exploration, before the advent of modern transportation, communications or mechanical technologies.

Advance Praise

“Fortune’s Favor, the ironic title of Kim Roberts’s fine recreation of Scott’s second expedition to Antarctica, is perfect for the book’s combination of high courage and terrible luck. Though we may know the story, its retelling in disciplined, beautifully descriptive verse brings it to startling life.”
—Linda Pastan

“’The sea stood up and soon we found/ourselves in steady plunge.’ Thus speaks Robert Falcon Scott, Antarctic explorer in ‘Stormy Seas,’ which opens Kim Roberts’s arresting sequence of poems—compressed epic that chronicles an expedition to the South Pole. And ‘plunge’ is apt—immediately I found myself immersed in the macro (‘Thoughout the winter, ice sheets move and twist,/they tear apart and press up into ridges’) and the micro (‘He couldn’t walk, a wild look in his eyes.’) elements of this renowned story, both ill-fated and moving, in which five men, tight-knit (‘It’s quite impossible to speak too well/of my companions’), push forward on a journey that tests the limits of human endeavor.”
—Francisco Aragón

“Kim Roberts has uncovered the poetic beauty of the ‘stiff upper lip’ resolve found in the journals of polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott. The story of his tragic second expedition to the South Pole has seldom been told with such formal control, flashes of color, and suspense. In Fortune’s Favor, Roberts has created sonnets as ‘unrivaled and sublime’ as Antarctica’s Mt. Erebus itself—Brava!”

—Reginald Harris

Reviews

In Polar Research, Dr. Kevin McGrath calls the book “a small and succinct triumph in delineating the tragic course of Scott’s team” that is “highly distinct and authentic.” He continues: “Science is inferential and rational, poetry is inspired and metaphorical: Roberts merges these two intellectual forms by deriving her own experience—what in fact becomes the book—from the written logbook of the explorer, as she re-enacts his voice and thought; there is thus a double textuality at work here…The work is a slight but wonderful tribute to humanity’s endeavour towards the acquisition of empirical knowledge in the face of terrific natural duress.”

In Prick of the Spindle, C.L. Bledsoe writes: “Roberts’ presentation of the journey juxtaposes the bravery of the men with their sacrifices and eventual deaths…They attempted something audacious, and in a sense, they succeeded by capturing the imaginations of a country and people all over the world.”

In The Washington Independent Review of Books, Grace Cavalieri praises the book’s “20 perfect sonnets” as “a groundbreaking piece of history of science in verse.” She continues, “The words that come to mind while reading this are ‘humility’ and ‘honesty.’ Never does Roberts stretch a glide to sensationalize an already dramatic circumstance. She shows the surface of events and lets the facts reveal the depth of what’s at stake. No showboating. No making matters better or worse. Just finding the right emotional vocabulary to tell the story cleanly and imagistically. The end result is that we experience rather than watch. Detailed and inventive, these are highly charged well made verses that not only reveal what happened on our geographic globe, but extend poetry’s globalization as well.”

Chosen for the Pearl Poetry Prize by Debra Marquart, Animal Magnetism “investigates, in language as rich, complex, and nuanced as the body itself, the unlit interiors of physical and emotional anatomy.”

Marquart continues: “Borne out of the author’s own deep searching following a serious illness, each poem, each line, feels deeply earned…While these poems are beautifully-made and sometimes funny or painful, they are also brimming with information…Here the narrator functions as a trained docent, leading the reader on a private tour of the wonders and curiosities that document the early explorations of medicine and anatomy, in which the inner workings of the human body were first opened to the human eye.”

Book Reviews

From The Hollins Critic, by Elizabeth Poliner:

“The fact of illness, Roberts’s own and that of a dear friend for whome she cared and to who in death this collection is dedicated, quietly winds its way through the lines of these observant, poignant poems…Juxtaposed brilliantly with her poems inspired by exhibits at medical museums is a poetic series entitled ‘My Imaginary Husband.’ Marriage, the poet reminds us as she describes her fantasy husband’s testicles (“Husband, someone packed your groceries poorly”), his curly hair (“soft half-moons”), or how he likes to cook breakfast (“in nothing but underwear”) is a most intimate union of two bodies. Often hilarious, and bursting with original imagery (“[e]ach night your stocks accrue/a deep and dreamless sleep/spooning next to my bonds”), the poems in this series, on the surface so distinct from the medical poems, nevertheless continue to explore the human body–as exposed and vulnerable in marriage, the poems suggest, as when on formal display at museums.”

From Rattle, by Mike Maggio:

“Animal Magnetism takes the reader on an unexpected and fascinating tour – a tour of the human body via an exploration of unusual museums and peculiar collections of medical memorabilia. From Philadelphia to Florence, from London to Istanbul, the poems in the collection escort us on a curious journey and, like a lyrical ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not!,’ present us with an amalgamation of the odd and the amazing while, at the same time, exploring physical frailty and the limitations of the human body.”

Sample Poems

ANIMAL MAGNETISM
Discovered by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815)

Come, Doctor,
with your iron rods,
your magnetized water,
and bathe me. Touch me
with your fingertips,
and spark my animal essence.
Tune the fluid of my soul.

Across planetary space
electricity leaps,
the vital ether that sustains
our human organs.
In balance, the soul transmits
freely an ecstatic song.
Unbalanced, the ether
loses its harmony, harbors
sickness and decay.

I want to be healed!
Bring on your devices,
strap me in your wires. Bewitch.
Make the dry channels surge
as they once did, call down
the very powers of the black planets.
Mesmerize me.

THE APOTHECARY DOLL
The National Museum of Health and Medicine, Washington, DC

Nearly four feet tall, the woman,
carved from wood,
painted and waxed,

has bendable joints.
Beneath the wooden
nipples

her flesh has been stripped
to reveal removable organs,
liver, kidney, colon, all —

painted mauve and ruby and ocher
and labeled carefully
in kanji.

What magic do you hoard, woman,
what secret lore
in your ankles and knuckles,

in your jape and joke,
your vapor?
The face is calm, eyes

open, but not too wide,
eyelids giving
a languorous gaze

that must have reassured
the clients who came
to point at where they hurt,

hoping a pill or salve
the apothecary mixed
in his wide-mouthed alabaster mortar

could relieve the pains
in their own chests,
return them to their days—

like wooden shapes so neatly classed,
so precisely ordered—
healed and whole.