Alchemy by Kris Whorton

In Alchemy, Kris Whorton starts her poems in the dead center of the body, in the beating heart, and pulses outward to show how her speakers face the world, life, family, friends, all our struggles. These are carefully wrought poems in form but wild in nature and “in” nature. We are outside on mountaintops and deep in the woods. We are in the middle of stone circles and in the hottest part of the desert. All the while, though, we are with her as she contemplates the deep within-ness. “You were a hurricane with an enormous eye,” she writes. And so are these poems, whirling from the core of everything. This is a beautiful collection.

–Jessica Barksdale, author of Grim Honey.

“I live in the eye,” Keats once wrote to his brother, an eye that traversed, as Kris Whorton’s Alchemy so skillfully does, from the body to the cosmos. In an early poem in her intensely personal and yet expansive vision, she writes” A red line five inches long runs from the left side of my bellybutton / to my pubic line” and in a short space brings us from that hospital scar to a bodied world she compares to “a Jupiter with pastel-colored / stripes.” In this very physical world, leaves are visualized as “furry-bellied,” mountains can hulk and crouch, one can feel the pulse of a desert. It is, then, a world revealed vividly through that Keatsian eye as we journey from lovers to family, from discovery to tragedy as she scans her past. Whether finding a skeleton in the woods, observing black bears or dolphins, or even meditating on her own eventual death, Whorton brings us on a masterful, heartfelt journey where to not “always recognize what we’re seeing” is to enhance the mysterious “alchemy” of our lives.

–Richard Jackson, author of The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems

In Kris Whorton’s poetry the body and landscape are interchangeable—wildness and wilderness abound. There are scars, needs, vibrancy. Anatomy is damaged, such as in the opening poems describing spine surgery and the aftermath. The spine becomes the landscape, and the creatures in it. This is echoed in a later poem describing a hawk with its kill, compared with a father’s surgery, “the scalpel a claw.” We are nature, and subject to it, and to its desires. Several times in the poems, the speaker notes an inability to say no. Sure, that might come with some drawbacks. And some good stories with them. But these poems are a wholehearted celebration of yes.

–Danielle Hanson, author of Fraying Edge of Sky

The erotic, the familial, and the natural/geographical provide the most notable ingredients in Kris Whorton‘s debut collection, Alchemy. A depth of perception and understanding gird all these poems.

–Stephen Corey, author of As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them: New and Selected Poems, 1981-2020

Unfurling into the Rocky Mountain air of remembering the pain, but not the hurt, cumulus clouds of Kris Whorton’s stories drift across landscapes of bicycle riding rhythm, hiking up-hill solitude, rock climbing bliss, running a marathon sweat-music. Each poem in this collection tells a story wrapped inside of other stories. Each setting counts us present. Word by word, quietly, in every line, we are invited to hear, then listen to the language of “Rafting on the Green.”

–Earl S. Braggs, author of In Which Language Do I Keep Silent