Kyle Harvey : Cosmographies

It's always been the matter with poetry

posing the question       asking the answer

putting the next      opener and shaper

Kyle Harvey lets those hidden corners show

a flash in the dense      a wink to a world

dancing substances       moving poems   

— Clark Coolidge

Kyle Harvey’s Cosmographies is a fearless book. In the eponymous opening section he really does take on the origins of time and space, mind and language; he then goes on in “The Alphabet That Never Recovers” to channel early humans’ experiences of language, thought, and spirituality; and finally in “Western Suites,” gets personal, if you can say that such free-swinging and wide open language is ever exactly personal in any usual sense. poems/go, taking/with them only/what we let go of./Whole oceans of meaning/revealed./ Don’t ask me/what I mean/Don’t tell me/what you mean./ Meaning/is the murder/ of process. Indeed! 

 — Norman Fischer

A humility born of contemplation of the cosmos underwrites the poems of Kyle Harvey’s Cosmographies, radiating outward from the poet’s I to the furthest reaches of the universe. Literary time falls away and history too and place as only local, and one is where one is, which is here, in geological space/time, Denver Nuggets notwithstanding. It would almost be prayer if it weren’t too much poem. The visionary still puts in the work, weighing and measuring his materials with a careful hand. A mountain Mallarmé withdrawing volumes from adjacent book cliffs, Harvey has built a refuge from the transactional chaos of an illyrical world, a cool place to inhabit. 

 — Garrett Caples

Kyle Harvey is a poet, filmmaker, photographer, and musician. His collection, Hyacinth, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and winner of the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Dirty Chai, Entropy, Heavy Feather Review, HOUSEGUEST, Metatron, Pilgrimage, SHAMPOO, Think Journal, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and elsewhere. He has published two serial poems, July, and Farewell Materials (Lithic Press), as well as a package of broadsides titled The Alphabet’s Book of Colors (Reality Beach). Harvey directed the documentary films, Portolano: A Film About Jack Mueller and It’s Nice to Be with You Always: A Film About Neeli Cherkovski. He lives with his wife and children in Fruita, Colorado, where he manages Lithic Bookstore & Gallery and designs books for Lithic Press.

PAPERBACK. 7x9 inches. 100 pages. 2022.
ISBN: 978-1-950055-11-1