Boston Athenæum

April 26, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. Opinel is the name of a workaday knife wielded by shepherds and farmers in the high pastures of the Alps. Like the knife, these poems cleave away the false and deceptive to reveal a startling and unifying wonder. In language radiant, lovely, and disturbing, Rebecca Kaiser Gibson explores the linkages between the uncomfortable familiar and the curiously intimate strange, making unexpected connections between phenomena. Arranged by association rather than chronology and connected by a sensual intelligence, this collection wanders from Maryland and India to Boston, France, New Hampshire and Ireland—from Ezekiel’s Flight and the Book of Kells, to tales of the Tamil goddess, Meenakshi.