Meet VCU's Authors: Kathleen Graber

Spring 2021

The River Twice

Professor of English and Creative Writing Kathleen Graber will read from and discuss her recent collection of poems, The River Twice (Princeton UP, 2019), winner of the UNT Rilke Prize, University of North Texas. According to the publisher’s website, “Taking its title from Heraclitus’s most famous fragment, The River Twice is an elegiac meditation on impermanence and change. The world presented in these poems is a fluid one in which so much—including space and time, the subterranean realm of dreams, and language itself—seems protean, as the speaker’s previously familiar understanding of the self and the larger systems around it gives way. Kathleen Graber’s poems wander widely, from the epistolary to the essayistic, shuffling the remarkable and unremarkable flotsam of contemporary life. One thought, one memory, one bit of news flows into the next. Yet, in a century devoted to exponentially increasing speed, The River Twice unfolds at the slow pace of a river bend. While the warm light of ideas and things flashes upon the surface, that which endures remains elusive—something glimpsed only for an instant before it is gone.”