Poet Katie Ford's debut collection, Deposition, confronts God in a language as shifting and ecstatic as divine encounter
This comes out of folklore. Invented because tenderness at times must be written in. There was a woman. There was a cross. But in fact they have hung him too high to be touched.―from "A Woman Wipes the Face of Jesus"

Deposition: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Ford, Katie

Poetry

Graywolf Press

The visceral new work by Katie Ford, whose poems "possess the veiled brilliance of stained glass windows seen at night" (The New York Times Book Review) 
If you respect the dead and recall where they died by this time tomorrow there will be nowhere to walk. ―"Earth"
With gravity and resplendence, Colosseum confronts ruin in the ancient world and in the living moment, from historical accounts and from firsthand experience. Displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Katie Ford returns this powerful report attesting to the storm's ferocity and its aftershock. Ford examines other catastrophes―those biblical, obscured by time, and those that play out daily, irrefutably, in the media. Colosseum is an essential, moving book in its insistence that our fates are intertwined and that devastation does not discriminate.

Colosseum

Graywolf

"Katie Ford's is a finely-wrought lyrical beauty, a poetry of detail and care, but she has set it within an epic arc." --Poetry I lie still, play dead, am delivered decree: our daughter weighs seven hundred dimes, paperclips, teaspoons of sugar, this child of grams for which the good nurse laid out her studies as a coin purse into which our tiny wealth clinked, our daughter spilling almost to the floor. --from "Of a Child Early Born"
In Katie Ford's third collection, she sets her music into lyrics wrung from the world's dangers.Blood Lyrics is a mother's song, one seared with the knowledge that her country wages long, aching wars in which not all lives are equal. There is beauty imparted, too, but it arrives at a cost: "Don't say it's the beautiful / I praise," Ford writes. "I praise the human, / gutted and rising."

Blood Lyrics: Poems

History & Criticism

The transformative new book from “one of the most important American poets at work today” (Dunya Mikhail)
I am content because before me looms the hope of love. I do not have it; I do not yet have it.
It is a bird strong enough to lead me by the rope it bites; unless I pull, it is strong enough for me.
I do worry the end of my days might come and I will not yet have it. But even then I will be brave
upon my deathbed, and why shouldn’t I be? I held things here, and I felt them.
―From “Psalm 40”
The poems in Katie Ford’s fourth collection implore their audience―the divine and the human―for attention, for revelation, and, perhaps above all, for companionship. The extraordinary sequence at the heart of this book taps into the radical power of the sonnet form, bending it into a kind of metaphysical and psychological outcry. Beginning in the cramped space of selfhood―in the bedroom, cluttered with doubts, and in the throes of marital loss―these poems edge toward the clarity of “what I can know and admit to knowing.” In song and in silence, Ford inhabits the rooms of anguish and redemption with scouring exactness. This is poetry that “can break open, // it can break your life, it will break you // until you remain.” If You Have to Go is Ford’s most luminous and moving collection.

If You Have to Go: Poems

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ford, Katie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ford, Katie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ford, Katie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Deposition: Poems

Colosseum

Blood Lyrics: Poems

If You Have to Go: Poems