A Little Family
Kathryn Rantala
ISBN 978-1-959556-71-8 126 pages $20.00
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At once evanescent as life itself and beautifully precise, these are remarkably fluid pieces that have both the advantages of fiction and of prose poetry. They lull you, and then surprise you, moving subtly in unexpected directions.
—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
and The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell.
Kathryn Rantala’s short pieces are marked by a quiet yet insistent tenacity, a precision of language and vision that make the tiniest details of this journey numinous and profound.
—Dawn Raffel, author of Boundless as the Sky and Carrying the Body.
In A Little Family, quiet scenes open with intricate details and anecdotes then expand into unexpected vistas. Something as simple as a walk to a movie may dissolve into the void or open up to the whole earth, the whole universe. These stories are exponentially bigger than they look, and stun with stealthy grace.
—Angela Woodward, author of Ink and Natural Wonders
A re-envisioning of human life and nonhuman life with a poetics that is thoughtful and surprising and rigorous...
—Daniel Borzutzky, author of The Performance of Becoming Human,
winner of the National Book Award.
Kathryn Rantala is the author of 3 Letters & Julius (2018) and The Finnish Orchestra (2013), and others. Her extensive assortment of journal credits includes The Notre Dame Review, The Denver Quarterly, 3rd Bed, Cake Train, elimae, Alice Blue, New Orleans Review, Archipelago, Drunken Boat, The Oregon Review, Raven Chronicles, Diagram, Pear Noir!, Big Other, and, in Paris, Upstairs at Duroc. She was nominated in 2022 for a second Pushcart Prize and has five poems included in the Big Other Anthology 2022. Her short story, “Metropolitana,” received the LitPot Short Story Award, judged by Walter Cummins, and at one time she held the title for most lifetime nominations for the Rhysling Poetry award. A past reader for the William Stafford Poetry Award and the Washington Poets Association contest, she is a long-time resident of Edmonds, Washington, where she founded Ravenna Press and the journals Snow Monkey (with poet Christiel Cottrell) and The Anemone Sidecar.