Falling: A Memoir in Verse (featuring Georgia Kreiger)

In lines both supple and brittle, Kreiger surrounds her private experiences with startling images whose collisions bang into the heart.  The rose, nearby crows, even the fog and snow are ominous, foreboding, and irresistible.  There’s brutality and betrayal here, and the growing knowledge that to survive is, in some ways, to name. Title aside, these moving poems are finally not about falling but about the courageous power of holding on.

Barbara Hurd, The Singer’s Temple

Georgia Kreiger’s Falling is a tightrope walk in verse, held taut by the tension between “what cannot [and] (what must) be told.” Unrelentingly confessional and deeply personal, the book’s revelations arise from the very act of falling. But the fall is defiant, fierce, and born of “a longing so urgent / it can pull other worlds / through walls.” To overcome the horrors of her childhood the poet must face a father who “came into my room to touch the part of me I could not hide,” a mother who “told me / to swallow all of the secrets / and hold them inside / because // what-others-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-us,” and a nightmarish memory revealed like a headline: “Ten-Year-Old Girl / Raped in Backyard Shed.” It is through the poetic act that the poet reclaims her life from the throes of childhood trauma, from a history that did its best to leave her “with no tongue to cry out to the milk-gray sky.” But cry out she does, and in this formidable, lyric, subversive collection Kreiger writes a “memoir in verse” that emboldens reader and poet alike, proving that there is as much power in falling as in rising again.