A Varied and Often Tender Muliplicity

K Prevallet's poetry is so damned alive! It blossoms, then bursts, words spread on winds, re-seeding elsewhere, twisting, unfurling, reaching for the sun and embodying worldbeing as a mindbody state. Prevallet has been a wildly performative and investigative poet for decades-always at the edge of what matters-and what she studies she transforms into trenchant, meditative, activist language. Her work is evocative, politically steeped, and resonating with the beauty that lives in the shadow of melancholy. In this varied and tender multiplicity, her poems reveal an anima-materia medica with the lyric ear of a good spell, wondrously transforming poems and plants, displacing the identities of each. After all, both plants and poems are archives, portals, ancestors, conversation partners, and healers who know where we've been and where we're going. Marvelous, shape-shifting and original, this book evokes the Asphodel Meadows- that ancient section of hell in Greek mythology where souls (poets!) keep on churning, even in the underworld. And isn't the meadow what is most needed? A place where we can return, to grow, to mourn, and return again. To read these poems is to heal vividly, from the inside out and the outside in. I am outside, already, reading it. -A Meadow of Blurbs for A Varied and Tender Multiplicity: Compiled from the generous praise of poets Betsy Andrews, Hoa Nguyen, Mary Newall, Gillian Osborne, Evelyn Reilly, Leonard Schwartz, James Sherry, Cole Swensen, Edwin Torres, and Anne Waldman.