Little Hiroshimas by Kip Knott

I am always amazed when I step into a museum and every wall becomes, at once, a window and a mirror. Really, that’s the gift all art provides—to show us the world and to show us ourselves IN the world in the same instance. That’s precisely the gift of Kip Knott’s new ekphrastic collection, Little Hiroshimas. Page by page, these poems demolish and rebuild, wreck and heal, with color and song and memory. More than all that, they stand in front of this world, full of paintings and pain, and help us blink, line after line, until we can “pull something / tangible out from the dark.”

–Jack B. Bedell, author of Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks, Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2017-2019

Kip Knott’s Little Hiroshimas is an ode to ekphrasis and proof that poetry can reanimate and recontextualize the visual arts. In the opening poem, Knott writes “Every artist destroys / one thing to create another,” and this chapbook puts this theory into practice. Each poem in this collection takes a knife to a canvas, slits it open to find the untold story hidden inside. Knott is a champion of art’s expansiveness and fluidity, how each interaction with a piece of art is also an opportunity for dialogue, for witnessing, for transformation.

–Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm and I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times