Kristen Case is a writer and an educator.

Available Now: Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar

What does tradition afford the figure eclipsed or possessed by its foundational gestures? Drawing on sources as diverse as the haunting myth of Daphne and Apollo and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Kristen Case engages the Western tradition to examine the way violence disrupts and yet paradoxically unleashes understanding, illuminating the ways that knowledge is inextricably tied to experiences of both beauty and brutality. The recurring refrain from Wittgenstein’s lover, “I long to be with you in any open space,” serves as a poignant motif throughout the collection’s brave yearning for connection that transcends predatory impulses. Daphne’s tonic utterances make way for such an opening. —Karla Kelsey

Illuminated by a daring and brilliant “alphabetical light,” Daphne by Kristen Case reveals “tree-life” as a “shivering and light-saturated language,” one where “possibilities of leaf-light are layered into a picture of infinity.” Dazzlingly erudite and intimately lyrical, Case’s poems embody a philosophy of desire within the embrace of the human imagination, one where the poet reconfigures trauma and memory. Daphne also explores the artistic realm of ekphrasis in an astute reading of Bernini’s statue of Daphne and Apollo while engaging in thoughtful dialogue with sister poems like “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Offering notes on classical aesthetics interwoven with gorgeous seaweed wrack “inking” the Maine coast, this tree-lined book of laurels offers the radiant, mythological transformations of our daily lives: “In the moment love is consumed by its machinery, personhood slips out and seals itself in wood.” —Karen An-hwei Lee, author of The Beautiful Immunity and Phyla of Joy

A refrain piercingly thrills its way throughout the entirety of Kristen Case’s newest collection, “I long to be with you in any open space,” though she didn’t write those words herself. Their source is a letter from Francis Skinner, lover of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher who feared that an erotic life forsook a truthful one. That plaintive sentence returns us over and again to the touchstone cares of Daphne’s crisis: Eros and Void, longing and open space. I mean simply to suggest that Kristen Case is at work in a kind of first-philosophy, which is now as it has always been, also a first-poetry, and the primary tenets of her concern are the very mythological fundaments that occupied Hesiod, Parmenides, and Empedocles. Case reminds us, as a genuine poet must, that we have yet to resolve the oppositions of our nature: mind and body, soul and thing, voice and void. In doing so, she traces lyric’s ravished eons in which violence and love bewilderingly interpenetrate, from Daphne and Apollo, to Keats and the Grecian Urn. How intimate thought is in the body that holds the thinking, how intricate the voice that sings of woundedness out the wound that is the mouth. In essays that wild into lyric, in lyrics that assay her own experience, we find a book skeptical of the traditions it also believes in, such is the crux of being in the penetralium, where eros is also epistemology. —Dan Beachy-Quick

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An intricately charted yearbook of [Thoreau’s] observations and thoughts. . . A poet and a scholar, Case brings the work to thrilling life.”—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

“At his death in 1862, Henry David Thoreau left behind a rich seedbed of unfinished projects. Now, Kristen Case, an amazingly perceptive scholar, has sketched for us the promised fruit of one of these. Thoreau’s Kalendar, a years-long charting of ‘natural phenomena’ in Concord, Massachusetts, pointed the way toward an ecology of time in which the mind and moods of the naturalist are rightly joined to the plants and animals whose seasons Thoreau had so faithfully recorded. This book is a major contribution, not just to Thoreau scholarship but to everyone from ecologists and climate scientists to historians and philosophers of time.”—Lewis Hyde, author of The Essays of Henry David Thoreau

“For years Thoreau’s stunning late-life charts of natural phenomena have seemed impossible to read—until now. It took Kristen Case, with a scholar’s eye and a poet’s heart, to reveal these baffling works as nothing less than the culmination of Thoreau’s life-long artistry, in which all that seemed lost to the past can live again in the unfolding of the present. Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar invites us to reimagine our lives in keeping with Thoreau—and with Case, herself a literary artist whose illuminations deserve to be lived with and reflected on, hand in hand with Thoreau’s—across the turning of time.”—Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life

“Henry David Thoreau’s Kalendar will be doubly welcome to all readers seriously interested in Thoreau, for it offers both the long-awaited first comprehensive edition of Thoreau’s last important unpublished manuscript and a deeply discerning and eminently readable account of the work’s history and significance by editor Kristen Case.”—Lawrence Buell, author of Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently

“A phenomenal book steeped in intricate attention to Thoreau’s ‘textual ecosystem.’ One gains fluency in reading not just Thoreau’s hand, but his heart, too—double its shadow and you will find Case’s hovering near.”—Jen Bervin, coeditor of The Gorgeous Nothings

Daphne