Red Appetite

isolation due to covid brought nature to our doors, examining human kindness 

and cruelty as it encroaches. In “Squunck” the skunk observes us as well. “I live 

/ in open air, uncontained / by the doors like coffin lids / that suffocate you inside 

/your fancy boxes.” Kilcup also laments isolation. In “On Not Being Touched” 

she writes, “I envy the river rocks / for the water curling over / their backs.” In 

“Belgian Mare and Foal” Kilcup celebrates a birth: “A flurry of legs / the pour of 

a creamy tail, / the flash of a russet back. / The mare observes, and nods.” I am 

enamored of Karen Kilcup’s work and am honored to have had the chance to 

publish two of the poems from this collection. —Lee (Lori) Desrosiers, author of  

The Philosopher’s Daughter, Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak, and Keeping 

Planes in the Air, and editor of Naugatuck River Review and Wordpeace 

All too often we humans are guilty of a “habit / of not seeing what’s there,” as 

Karen Kilcup claims in her poem “The Sixth Cat.” But in these poems, she pays 

attention. Red Appetite is filled with close looks at the myriad of creatures that 

share our planet, from the tiny water striders that “cannot see / the quick shadow 

/ that glides beneath / the river’s lucent skin, / the gulf that lies / below” to the 

bobcat, the “graceful spotted ghost,” that “leaves behind a chill that never / 

eases.” From a deep observation of the small lives we often glimpse in our wild 

and more-domesticated spaces, these poems deftly straddle a first-time 

gardener’s fierce frustration with the wild pillagers that seek the same bitter 

greens in spring as we do, and the often humorous empathy for those small lives 

we too often overlook.  

—Katherine Solomon, author of Tempting Fate  

Red Appetite is a taxonomy of the joy and quirks of animals that live around us, 

haunted all the while by death and the COVID lockdown. In these tight, lyrical 

poems, mortality hunts the speaker like the bobcat that stalks the barnyard and 

the woodchuck that undermines the garden. These poems echo Maxine Kumin’s 

ethical introspection while others hint at the starkness of Robinson Jeffers’ 

animal poems. The music here allows the reader a taste of the sublime in the 

midst of a world that is always falling and rising: 

The neighbor’s ornamental cherry tree / sags with blooms. Too soon, / 

they’ll wash the dark ground / with pink, soft underfoot, as if / someone 

holding her breath / exhaled. 

Red Appetite is a focused meditation on how we are reflected in these animals, 

both domesticated like the barnyard cat or mare, and more wild like the possum, 

junco, and bobcat. Kilcup’s collection is a nuanced read that leads one to rejoice 

in spring and reflect that new life is due only to the coldness brought by winter. 

—Gregory Byrd, author of The Name for the God Who Speaks, winner of the 

2018 Robert Phillips Prize