FROM YOUR HOSTESS AT THE T&A MUSEUM

In Kathleen Balma’s first full-length collection, intelligent soybeans plot to take over the Midwest, ghosts seek out psychoanalysis, embryonic Abraham Lincolns design their cabin home, and baby snub-nosed monkeys live out a lyrical and heartbreaking soap opera. Witty, fresh, whimsical and musical, From Your Hostess At The T&A Museum is one of those very rare feats, poems of both thought and song, a beguilement of both intellect and ear. I found it a joyride from beginning to end, a thoroughly smart and rewarding debut; Balma is a poet I hope to follow for years to come.  —Hailey Leithauser, author of Swoop

Kathleen Balma's debut poetry collection is a marvelous concoction steeped in myth, nostalgia, humor, and the chimerical. Sirens are juxtaposed with Dreamsicles, John Wayne rides in on a John Deere tractor, and Brigadoon and Salvador Dalí are saluted in a poem about stopping time. Punctuated with startling similes like Abe Lincoln as a “Christmas specter,” Balma’s book is “a complex amalgam of positive and negative” imagery, shining with both wit and wonder.  —Simone Muench, author Wolf Centos

A ghost needs an audience or it is pointless,” writes Balma, and the same can be said about poets. “But does a ghost need a point?” she continues. No. Does a poet? Jeez, I hope not! Poems are toys, not vitamin pills, and these are full of playfulness. They’re also full of contradictions (see “Revelation at the Invisible Gun Show”), because between the contra- and the diction is where the poem is found. I won’t tell you what “the best sad thing that’s happened to me all year” is, but it’s a doozy. Read on, reader, and let Kathleen Balma free your mind.  —David Kirby, author of The Ha-Ha

The zigs and zags of Balma's mind, in addition to offering a great ride, remind me that a straight line is what I want out of a ruler, not a poem. You should stand up when reading this book, because her poems don't ponder or pander, they run.   —Bob Hicok, author of This Clumsy Living

In the very first poem of FROM YOUR HOSTESS AT THE T&A MUSEUM, Balma pulls out all the [voice] stops: "once a pastel whine, now an atonal woodwind/of desire" ... She's language-focused, less Language, a subtle corralling of such for surprise as well as narrative draw ... The verity these days is that even a book of poetry has to tell a story. No miscellany! ... Balma triumphs with the first half brimming with slimly related bon-bons, then brilliantly tightrope-walks the entire second half.   —Terese Svoboda, author of Mere Mortals