ABOUT HABITATS

Published in 2024 by Poetry NW Editions, as part of the Possession Sound Series.
Habitats, Katharine Whitcomb’s robust new collection, is her best yet-a field guide to the pleasures and perils of adulthood, a reckoning with what is and what will never be. Moving through disappointment and joy, divorce and remarriage, the death of parents and a stare down with her own allotted time on Earth, Whitcomb seeks out or stumbles into rooms of reflection, landscapes that enlarge us, gardens and clearings where “lean and stubborn devotions” take root. These lush and rugged poems are alive to the “tug of memory / awake in everything,” those habitats of geography and mind that clarify and define what is most important-belonging to ourselves. “Not young or uncomplicated or down-to-earth,” Whitcomb is both realist and dreamer, uncovering the “mercy in each minute of the sense’s deft erasure.” Niche by niche, line by line, she “persists in loving the world,” finding wherever she looks a certain hard-won grace, not wanting to be “anyone or anywhere else.” Habitats is many worlds at once-a marvelous journey into the powers of ordinary witness and a testament of the courage to change.

Photography: @rosanneolson.com

Praise for Habitats

Through these lyrically precise, formally adept poems, Katharine Whitcomb journeys and earns a singular vision, where a cypher becomes a threshold to discovery, and any truly lived moment uncovers an unforgettable world.
-Arthur Sze

In Habitats, Katharine Whitcomb gives voice to a human consciousness that feels the world with profound intensity, and then transforms that feeling into rigorous, heightened language. . . . A moving, memorable, important book from a poet at the height of her powers.
-Mark Wunderlich

Habitats is a brave and perceptive book, walking the reader through the personal that is also collective. . . . A book of rooms—poems—as big as all life.
–Jesse Lee Kercheval