The poems in Kay Cosgrove's first collection, Anybody Home? are driven by curiosity - about herself, the world, and her place in it. Witty and elegantly restrained, they ask the question: how do we live the lives we've made for ourselves? Cosgrove roams from barrooms to checkout lines to the enigma of motherhood; she is a teenager responsible for a sack-of-flour-as-a-baby, and then an adult driving a teenage babysitter home. She explores the texture of our connections to strangers, family, ourselves, and illuminates the sublime in the unimportant. The poems in Anybody Home? embrace life's sweetness and shadows. Here, the ordinary is unfathomable and the ineffable is ordinary.
At dusk last night I blew the biggest bubble
for my girls. It captured everything:
the black shutters and dead-headed geraniums,
two cars and two girls and a skinny man
pulling weeds - all of it
so hard to see
except when it floats
in a crystal ball
right before your eye.
"God's Law is not Fully Knowable to Human Beings, Thomas Aquinas Wrote" by Kay Cosgrove
KAY COSGROVE is the recipient of awards from The Academy of American Poets, Inprint Houston, and The Westchester Review. Her poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, the Florida Review and the American Poetry Review, among other journals. She holds a PhD from the University of Houston and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Pennsylvania with her family.