fruitlands

Kate Colby

2006 • 80 pp. • $12.00 • ISBN: 0-9723331-9-3
Cover photo: Orchard House c.1865.
Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association

• Norma Farber First Book Award Winner from the Poetry Society
  of America. 2007.
• CutBank review by Sommer Browning. March12, 2007.
• Bookslut interview with Kate Greenstreet. March 2008.
• Every Other Day interview with Kate Greenstreet. April 27, 2007.

Taking its title from the transcendentalist utopian community founded by Bronson Alcott, Fruitlands offers its own visionary perspective on contemporary life. In this collection, cultural work is social innovation, and Kate Colby produces and decomposes identity, history, and narrative through fully engaged aesthetic practice. While Fruitlands views the architectural or urban plan from the vantage of an Archimedean point, it inverts the telescope to record transformative and occasionally anarchic encounters on the human scale. Colby maps out exciting possibilities for poetry and other spaces of representation in this stunning debut.

— Paul Foster Johnson

Under pressure, under duress, being a creature of habit caught in the sudden glare of utopic wishfulness, one wakes up in Fruitlands, smuggled inside Colby's intriguing and recombinant language of surveillance, pulled into suggested routes of survival and eco-linguistic liberties in a century you suddenly desire.

— Kathleen Fraser

Kate Colby has a gift for blending observation with lyric energy and wit. Capturing the world through a constantly shifting frame, these poems urge us to consider the difference between the "false spring" and the real one. Colby's field of reference ranges from Hofstadter to Schwarzenegger, and her ambitious title poem will leave you reeling.

— Elizabeth Willis

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