Speak, Cairn by Lisa Kundrat

Description

Speak, Cairn

by Lisa Kundrat

$14.99, paper

978-1-63534-439-4

2018

Speak, Cairn takes the reader on a trip through a variety of natural landscapes (boreal forest by canoe, fruit-tree planting in an equatorial eco-city, soaking in mineral baths in Montana). The reader connects with people along the way who are rooted in the place the reader travels through. The reader continues to move, feeling moments of connection, but mostly alien and lost. The collection is book-ended by two poems concerning cairns, markers on a trail that show people where to go. As alone as we may feel as we travel through the world looking for home, when we add a stone to a cairn, we are connected to our fellow travelers. “We speak to each other through stones.” The final poem, “Hobo’s Song,” says, “We kneel before the world’s brokenness,/a puzzle that will never be finished./We build to repair, to make whole,/to connect the pieces, stone by stone.” As much as our human world is broken and each traveler alone, these poems reconnect us to each other and to the earth, like a human-made stack of stones.

Lisa Kundrat‘s sense of adventure has led her many places, including Montana, Ecuador and Hudson Bay. Her poems and writing have won a grant and fellowship, been published in periodicals, and been made into songs and performed in an opera. She grew up in Saint Cloud, Minnesota and has a BA from the University of Montana-Missoula and a MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, Andy.