The River Won't Hold You - Paperback

by Karin Gottshall (Author)

A haunting collection that peers into loneliness, memory, and the shadowed spaces we try and fail to leave behind.

Haunting and haunted, The River Won't Hold You navigates loneliness and loss with a quiet, relentless clarity. In poems shaped at the uneasy crossroads of imagination and lived experience, Karin Gottshall searches for solace in the charged spaces between them. "I tell myself I can be content with the pleasures / permitted ghosts," she writes in "Afterlife," "but my body wakes up / leaking saltwater, and won't let my ghost-self be."

Across the collection, poetic structure and the music of language become vessels for memory, philosophy, and ache. Generous in their formal range and attentive to both sound and silence, these poems resist tidy answers. The beauty of Gottshall's work arises from the steadiness of her gaze, and the startling precision of the images it lands on:
"Wide-open, staring eyes of the tiger / I drew and had to destroy because it wouldn't sleep."

The River Won't Hold You shows how the places we fear most--the gaps, the afterlives, the undefinable spaces--can also be the ones that hold us.

Author Biography

Karen Gottshall is the author of Crocus and The River Won't Hold You, as well as the chapbooks Flood Letters, Almanac for the Sleepless, and Swan. She teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.