Space Parsley

Kat Addis

Debut collection of mistranslations of Petrarchan love poems by Kat Addis. For Fans of: Shakespeare, Anne Carson, Katherine Angel, Jacqueline Rose, Alice Notley.

Kat Addis is an artist and PhD candidate (at NYU) in renaissance literature, currently writing a dissertation about slavery and race in early modern European epics. Space Parsley (the87press, 2021) is Kat’s first full-length book of poetry. Previous poems have been published in The Chicago Review, ZARF, Tears in the Fence, Stand Magazine, and PELT vol. 4: Feminist Temporalities, a publication by the Organism for Poetic Research. Kat makes experimental costumes and fabric installations which have appeared recently in the Devil’s Dyke Network’s Pleasure Garden Festival, performance art by Sophie Seita, music video by Dominic Sen, and [Space] Gallery in London. Kat also makes poetry/video art, often collaboratively with Joseph Minden, which has been shown by Urban Foxes Collective, London, NYMASA, New York, and Puderraum, Berlin.

"Whiplashed by its hot panache, this book makes me want to write poems again; reaffirms my belief in poetry. These assured lines will never lose their ‘grip on Venus’, they ‘stay sinewy and slow even in the major key’. I want all their ‘tubular crescendos’. These experimental translations will grab you — some will give you goose bumps, some will rub off their lyric pensiveness and cheeky melancholia; some will make your fierce-pipped heart feel fiercer again, in solidarity. I flamboyantly tip my imaginary hat to you, dear ‘Lady Philosophy’, Gardener of Poetic Parsley. ‘Yes, I can really hear you.’"

–Sophie Seita, author of My Little Enlightenment Plays and Provisional Avant-Gardes