A Red Knock-Knocking Like a Heart - by Kate Gaskin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart chronicles a mother's harrowing journey through infant loss and a disastrous hospital birth, while also exploring the joyful complexities of raising a neurodivergent child. Using image and sound derived from the beauty of the natural world, Kate Gaskin's poems sift through grief while tapping into the sublime state that underlies loss and love.

Review Quotes

"A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart is a gorgeous exploration of the complexities of parenting. It's astonishing how much beauty and pain Gaskin distills into line and form. Through still lifes and landscapes she turns moments of life into ekphrastic art. Breathtaking in their tenderness and honesty, the poems remind us how love breaks and remakes us every season."--Traci Brimhall

"Entering this beautiful, heartbreaking book is like walking through a gallery dedicated to preserving the precious artifacts of a world of grievous loss. Though the poems meditate on the darkest realities, light suffuses the blackest corners of grief. These poems are given to us by a suffering yet resilient soul, whose understanding of our flowering world is generous and profound."--Sidney Wade

"Kate Gaskin's A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart depicts a heart breaking and repairing in slow motion, but the most striking thing is the quality of this book's light--sadness and grief are as bright as the sun, a mass of nuclear fusion shining with excruciating brightness into all the hurt places, filling them with love. An extraordinary collection."--Niina Pollari

About the Author

Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War, winner of the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Southern Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She directs Adroit Journal's summer mentorship program and is an assistant editor for TRP: The University Press of SHSU.