It's official. My debut micro-collection of poetry, These Are the Women We Write About, has been added to Goodreads. Though the days toward publication near, this book still feels too much my own. But I know soon, my words will belong to the world. Such words remain a culmination of my obsession with the women of mythology; the women we write about.
On their new website, The Poetry Annals has quoted a line from one of my poems: "It's all in how they remember." And I know this, more than anything else, speaks for the bigger ideas held within this project. Each of us lives with recollection, and much of my poetry has been ripped from stories told and remembered.
But, I must admit these poems and the women within them are not exactly like the old stories. Many began while I followed the Plath Poetry Project and others continued from the voice I found following along with Sylvia's writing for a year. And from such inspiration, women such as Medusa and Artemis and Eurydice and Hecate and sirens singing; all of their stories have been reimagined within the pages of my micro-collection. They are women with a voice; they are women with a story.
The Poetry Annals has written a beautiful description to accompany the book, and they serve as an intimate understanding of all I've tried to create in these poems.
"Kayla King’s These Are the Women We Write About is both dreamlike and mythic. Drawing on the intricate stories of Greco-Roman mythology, her words trace the edges of the celestial and interrogate the boundaries between the known and unknown.
King writes with fluid and graceful language, crafting images both fragile and poignant. Her examination, through poetry, of the female narrative in myth is striking and beautiful in equal measure." -The Poetry Annals
While there are still 16 days until the publication of These Are the Women We Write About, this waiting time feels minute compared to the years I've spent writing these poems and telling stories long ago remembered. And after readers finish this micro-collection, perhaps they, too, will remember the women we write about.
