Cloisters

About the Author

Kristin Bock holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she teaches in the Business Communication Program. Her first collection, Cloisters, won Tupelo Press’s First Book Award and the da Vinci Eye Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Black Warrior Review, Columbia, Crazyhorse, FENCE, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill and VERSE. Bock is also a founding editor of the literary magazine Bateau, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow. She lives with her husband, artist Geoffrey Kostecki, in Montague, Massachusetts and together they restore liturgical art.

Advanced Praise

“Cloisters is a book that creates a sense of largeness despite its small borders…. Bock’s language is exquisite, wooing us into one lyric after another so swiftly that, even though we may not know where we are, we trust that Ms. Bock most certainly does. The effect is a book of almost God-like proportions: poems that we can observe and perceive but aren’t exactly certain we can fully understand…. Cloisters takes us into a world that at times seems secular and, at other times, clearly emanates from the spiritual; something akin to the afterlife, prayer. Cloisters is a book that not only explores but mimics the mysteries of human experience. We are the better for it.” –Rattle

“Poetry comes unbidden and it comes by design, with desire. I love this book’s adamant attentions and unashamed ardors.”” —Dara Wier

“Kristin Bock’s marvelous debut collection enacts an aesthetic of discrete moments, offering her reader an intelligence that works simultaneously upon the heart and at the margins of experience. The perspective here is edgy, nervous, compelling, and wise. In the pared delicacy of these poems, we discover both exceptional nuance and resonance—these are poems that trust their readers, poems that don’t oversell their emotions or perceptions. Kristin Bock’s poems are like the shards of a mirror that magically reflect a whole person, a whole woman, a whole mind and sensibility at work in the world. As in all of the best volumes of poetry, we come to admire the person in these poems, her vision and her character.” —David St. John, judge of the 7th Annual Tupelo Press First Book Award

“Kristin Bock’s poems are original and always surprising. Images are chiseled with great care, each word chosen with exacting particularity.” —James Tate

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-55-2