Tacking Stitch

Victoria Korth has given us a chapbook that packs the punch of a full-length book. Few poets do so many contrasting things and do them with such exacting and beautiful craft. She is a poet of evanescence, but also of definition, intimacy, objectivity, and nerve. She can be practical and she can be visionary. She knows when to press hard and when to be delicate, and her poems of the mother-daughter relationship are among the most honest and memorable that I know. She has a complex mind, but it is her ability to be simple and forthright that distinguishes her. While Tacking Stitch can be appreciated in one reading, it is with rereading that these poems show their extraordinary mettle.

-Rodney Jones

Yeats wrote his own epitaph, the surprising command-headstone: Cast a cold Eye / on Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by!-which came early to mind as I read into Victoria Korth's Tacking Stitch: a bracing and frank series of poems about family in which a cold eye looks hard at life and (impending) death with commanding poise. Persons who must be cut off; ancestors whose ardent, exciting stories have drifted out of living memory; a circle of often "mean-smart" beloveds prickly and fierce on purpose or just-helplessly. The poems establish this toughness, and then, in "flash[es] of half-perception made whole," we begin to see the lavish tenderness-despite that lies beneath them. Korth's portrayal of how we cling to and then suppress and then cling again to that tenderness...it's proof that the [temporary] tacking stitch prepares the way for an enduring seam.

-Sally Ball