Beauport

Kate Colby

2010 • 120 pp. • $15.00 • ISBN: 978-1-933959-11-5
Cover art by Paul Morrison

• Book of the Year Award poetry finalist. March 2011.
• Small Press Distribution Poetry Best-Seller. Jan - March 2011.
• Make Magazine review by Alyse Bensel. May 2011.
• New Pages review by Angela Veronica Wong. April 2011.
• H_NGM_N review by Steven Karl. Issue 12. April 2011.
• Publishers Weekly review. February 2011.
• Kelsey Street review by Val Witte. November 30, 2010.
• Litmus Spring Book Party Reading. June 10, 2011.

These are poems of quiet beauty, wielding power through lovely simplicity. They wander through ideas and memories, they explore what is lost and what is learned in the process of becoming a person...

— Angela Veronica Wong for New Pages review; April 2011

A book that is both lyrical and conversational. A book that always feels in the present. There’s beautiful music throughout... Ultimately, Beauport will set you adrift with beautiful imagery and haunting questions that will linger long after the book is finished...

—Steven Karl for H_NGM_N review; Issue 12, April 2011

In Beauport, Kate Colby tells the tale of the decorator and designer Henry Davis Sleeper, braiding in prose-lyric reminisces of her own New England upbringing and ‘anti-ekphrastic’ poems after Currier & Ives lithographs of the Victorian-era leisure class. This is Colby’s ‘sotted nineteenth century,’ peopled with antique glass buoys and ‘animate dioramas,’ where the sound of seagulls dropping quahogs on the roof echoes all day. Not since Charles Olson’s Maximus has Gloucester been so gallantly and aptly sung! 

— Julian T. Brolaski

Kate Colby’s Beauport opens windows framing history framing natural and unnatural settings (traffic, waves, skylines, sky). The work presents a series of displacements, smoke and mirror memory experiments, stitching together with anachronism the physical and the metaphysical. This is a fascinating book, composing and collapsing (wing, telescope), foregrounding subject, object and sightlines in between. With its architecture of vignettes, lullabies, hymns and fragments, Colby’s Beauport constructs resistances, ever confronting its considered grace and precision in ripples of savory humors.

contrails, line breaks
in the sky, dawning
discontinuous

— Norma Cole

With a fine intelligence and a subtle ear Colby tracks both instabilities and possibilities, the map that is but broken sherds and the sherds that can become a map.

— Rosmarie Waldrop on selecting Fruitlands for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, 2007

Kate Colby reads from Beauport at Beauport in Gloucester, MA. July 16, 2011.

The publication of this book is made possible, in part, by support from: