Strange Gift

With a keen eye for imagery, Veronica Kornberg brings the dearness of daily life to us from her perch on the edge of the Pacific, her newfound home: "We took it all on faith, as is. // Below us, the violent sea / broke its beautiful teeth on the rocks." Kornberg invites us into the rich sensory detail of the place and "how a person can be // changed entirely by the scent of sage and coyote mint, / by the quick tongues of painted ladies that swarm the sea daisies..." Against this backdrop, we're also led into family memories, "this conversation between the living and the long dead" and toward this conclusion: "It did not feel like loss, but a wheel turning." This is a lush debut, a narrative collection full of gift after Strange Gift.

-Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

Wondrous, dug from the earth, I trust these poems to lead me "toward the beat to follow, the flutter/ of blood, the bone."

-Danusha Laméris, author of Blade By Blade

Veronica Kornberg's gorgeous, transcendent poetry collection Strange Gift is a grounding, bountiful reaping-a landscape & seascape of memory which "peel[s] the body's waxy, rough skin / right down to the tender." These are some of the most distinctive, memorable poems on nature & memory that I've ever read. They never rush or push us into grief or joy. Instead, they offer us a sensory feast, a meditation on the tide, the garden & who we have loved & lost. Strange Gift is an elegant testament to "the hidden / marrow of days leaching thin." Alternating between vibrant & subtle images, these masterful poems remind me that being human means living in a shared world on borrowed time. And it is in that shared world that we must find ways to hold on, to let go & to bear witness to what remains.

-Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms

From the concrete edges of a New Jersey girlhood to the long-sought home on the Pacific Coast, the poems in Veronica Kornberg's Strange Gift trace a journey through landscapes that are at once external and deeply internal, ultimately a search for notions of home: "I thought maybe there was a place for me in this world," Kornberg writes in the titular poem, "a little side street off the parade route." In these poems, nature is both sanctuary and mirror reflecting the complexities of loss and renewal, a reminder that even in the most fractured and damaged landscapes, beauty persists. Above all, Strange Gift is a love letter to a life well-lived-to the bitter and the sweet, to loved ones past and present, and to the evening primrose in its unabashedly "frank availability." This is one stunning debut.

-Sarah Freligh, author of Sad Math and Other Emergencies