Black Holes and Their Feeding Habits - Kiyoko Reidy

In Kiyoko Reidy's Black Holes and Their Feeding Habits, the poet illuminates worlds that are exquisite, shimmering, made tender by awe and grief. The poems breathe portals into familial care, inherited violence, intergenerational loss, and the natural landscapes within and around us. We encounter "monarch wings resplendent as church windows"; an obaasan laying flowers at a cemetery; oranges "like fist-sized fires alight / in the branches," a bodily desire to be "borderless in the wild dark." In the wisdom of these poems, there lives a keen recognition of the self shape-shifting towards the light. As a reader, I'm spellbound by Reidy's lush attention to textures of care, which teach me to open myself to the world "wildly, marveling at all this abundance."

     -Carlina Duan, Alien Miss