Alexandra van de Kamp

Alexandra van de Kamp is the author of The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, forthcoming from CW Books (WordTech Press) in the Spring of 2010.

Her earlier collections include The Photographer's Interview (2006, Premier Poets Chapbook Series: 34); A Living Book (2004), with artwork by Rebecca Aidlin; and The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century (2002 Wind Magazine), winner of the 2001 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize.

Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in numerous journals, including Meridian, Rain Taxi, Red Rock Review, Poetry Northwest, Court Green, Salt Hill, Crab Orchard Review, Lake Effect, Quarter After Eight and Washington Square.

Her translations of two Spanish women poets, Ángela Pérez Ovejero and Marta López-Luaces, were featured in the Canadian magazine filling Station, and an interview with Billy Collins was
reprinted nationally in Imagine magazine (Johns Hopkins). She is one of the founding editors of Terra Incognita, an international literary/cultural journal in English and Spanish.

Alexandra lives in Port Jefferson, New York, with her husband, William Glenn, and teaches at Stony Brook University.

The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century (2002)

Winner of the 2002 Quentin R. Howard Chapbook Award
from Wind magazine, selected by Roger Mitchell.

Read the poem "The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century"

The Rainiest May in the Twentieth Century

For weeks, we dreamed ourselves
through each day—the corners of tables,
the intimate shapes of our hands
no longer enough
to jar us fully awake. In the kitchen,
the counters gave off their glittery stare,
but like any bottle or chair, we were rained upon
by the falling air—the rain touching
and touching us to its damp hair.

They say the dead keep growing
their hair and nails, their own kind of weather
wrapping around them, tethering them
more fervently to the earth
because of the persistence
of what surrounds them. And so,
we felt our own sleep deepen,
our bodies grow mute as stones
in a gray-green soil—reluctant to move
through such a thick, viscous world.

In the end, every window slurred our view—
the panes swelled by a slow-motion current.
My husband's body wavered, a fluid heaviness
moving towards me, and all the doors creaked
like old buoys out at sea. Even birds refused to sing—
too stunned, like us, with a certain quiet,
unable to commit to any one specific thing.

In this weather, there was no forgetting
where we were, no pushing off
from the present moment. For a time,
we were quieted, like figures
in a landscape painting who show us
they see the mountains in the distance
by the way their bodies are poised,
ready to listen.

Originally published in Poems & Plays.

A Living Book (2004)

Limited Edition of 200 beautifully handcrafted books

Poems - Alexandra van de Kamp
Paintings - Rebecca Aidlin

Read the poem "A Living Book," with two paintings by Rebecca Aidlin.

$10, plus $2 Shipping & Handling

A Living Book

Then the Lord said to me: ‘Do not be distressed,
for I will give you a living book’.
—Santa Teresa de Ávila

Today the air gleams like a steady page of light.
Clouds burrow into their whites and grays
as birds fly their small tight bodies
across the sky, pressing into me
the words they are. And what is a word
but the undeniable presence of each thing,
like a roof glinting with all of its shape in the rain,
its red-gray pebbled tile protruding through
the air’s vague light to tell us to shed
whatever is unsure in our minds?
If God is anything, He’s a merciless
precision—never sparing us any detail,
whether it is blood or coffee spilling.
We get into trouble when we doubt
what is given to us, as in ninth grade track
when I did the long jump and flew
as long as my eyes looked up,
but the minute I looked down,
my flying stopped.
The tree does its job by climbing,
without question, its one sentence
up the sky, the shadows by settling
into cool, sleek paragraphs,
and the grass by extending its plot,
unconcerned with beginnings or ends.

We ripple within the world’s story:
our bodies wandering their peculiar script
across the world as it wanders through us.
Each day, our mind’s dark shutter creaks
opened and closed—hinged to the question,
What do I let in? Santa Teresa, robbed
by the Inquisition of her books in Spanish,
let each window and chair lean
its word into her until her room
became a raised type—its letters precise
and inevitable—fighting off
the vagueness of the devil.

Meanwhile, the world writes its text.
A country road brightens in the evening rain—
a feverish gray cutting its way
through murky hills. I lean out my window
to accept its stubborn shine, as the glow sharpens,
gives off the next luminous line.