The Fact of the Matter: Poems

Moving from the mundane to the profound, first through observation of fact and matter, then shifting perspective, engaging a deeper sense of self, these poems re-imagine things great and small, making us care deeply about the world around us.

In this cultivated and intricately crafted collection, Sally Keith shows the self as a crucible of force-that which compels us to exert ourselves upon the world, and meanwhile renders us vulnerable to it. Force by which a line unfurls-as in Robert Smithson’s colossal Spiral Jetty-or leads with forward motion-a train hurdling along the west-reaching railroad; Edweard Muybridge’s photographic reels charting animal and human locomotion.

With poems remarkable in their clarity, captivating in their matter-of-factness, Keith examines the impossible and inevitable privacy of being a person in the world, meanwhile negotiating an inexorable pull toward the places we call home-one we alternately try and fail to resist.