After a fifty-year contest with language itself, Kathryn Rantala happened on two controlling metaphors for what she needs to say now about her place and condition. The result is TWO, the partnering of two smaller collections: Quarried Light and The Pauper Statues. Putting aside the compacted and stressed Imagism of her previous work, she speaks through characters, most of them women, some of them wooden, who inhabit cloistered worlds of meditation, suffering and charity. Told in the first-person, in mostly brief poems, she shows us saints and martyrs and carved Finnish alms-takers--and the people who interact with them--caught in their individual tragic arcs, floundering and foundering, lost and waiting to be found. 

Kathryn Rantala’s recent collection Malformations of the Human Heart follows Translated from the English (2026) and My Archipelago (2024) from Sandy Press, the latter a finalist for the 2024 Big Other award for poetry. In 2023, Spuyten Duyvil brought out her book of lyrical prose pieces, A Little Family. Kathryn’s books and artwork can be viewed at kathrynrantala.com.