Description
Traverse, Craft’s third collection, picks up where Vagrants & Accidentals left off, exploring the music, the miscues, the hidden forces and quirks of circumstance that constitute a human life, shape us into the people we become. It’s a book of family origins and discovery, an adoptee’s journey toward self-knowledge, a son’s journey toward becoming (and losing) a parent, navigating the cross-currents of estrangement and acceptance, ecological peril and ambiguous loss. It is also a history of walking, of moving through the world at human speed. As such, Traverse maps a new understanding of familial relation, from birth kin to chosen clan, from missing link to known donor children, arcing toward a wider embrace of the generational and archetypal substrates that inform identity, singular and plural alike. What kin are you to me? Craft asks, sifting through uncertainties, genealogies, and the geological record to find a deeper connection to both human and non-human nature, piecing together, step by step, a vision of expansive love, and the fragile ecology in which our lives subsist.
About the Author
Kevin Craft lives in Seattle and directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. For two decades he also served as a faculty director of the University of Washington’s Writers in Rome Program. His books include Solar Prominence, selected by Vern Rutsala for the Gorsline Prize (Cloudbank Books, 2005), Vagrants & Accidentals (University of Washington Press, 2017), and Traverse (Lynx House Press, 2023), selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poets Series. He has received fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy), the Camargo Foundation (France), 4Culture, The Jack Straw Cultural Center, PLAYA, and Artist Trust. In 2022 he was Artist in Residence at Olympic National Park, and often volunteers as a lookout steward in the North Cascades. Editor of Poetry Northwest from 2009 – 2016, he now serves Executive Editor of Poetry NW Editions.
