Cross-disciplinary chapbook created in collaboration with photographer Robert Revere. The book addresses the act of looking, and the experience of going to museums. It is also about the COVID pandemic, and a time when museums and cultural spaces were closed.

Reviews, Interviews

Listed in the Washington Blade‘s December 2023 “Favorite Books for Holiday Gifts”: “…a fab present for lovers of photography, museums, and poetry. Revere and Roberts were deeply affected by the closure of museums during the COVID pandemic. In this lovely chapbook, they create a new ‘museum’ of their own.”

Listed as one of 9 recommended books on Bay Area Reporters‘s “National Poetry Month LGBTQ Reading List” for 2024: “Queer poet and historian Kim Roberts joins the collaboration club with her new cross-disciplinary chapbook Corona/Crown (Word Tech Editions, 2023). Roberts’ project is particularly distinguished in that her collaborator is fine art photographer and foreign service officer Robert Revere. Co-created in response to the impact that the pandemic had on them individually regarding the sensation of being cut off from the cultural enrichment of visiting museums and other such venues. The pairing of Roberts’ poems and Revere’s photos creates a kind of gallery of the page.”

Advance Praise

“The writing and images in this many-layered book make me see my world in new ways. They bring together the most personal and the abstract, interacting and making me more and more curious as I turn each page, excited to discover what will come next. What new relationship will unfold between word and image, between self and other, between what is seen and what is perceived? This treasure of a book speaks on many levels about why and how art matters, what beauty is, and where we find it. Each time I reread it, I find something new. This is a book to be savored.”
—Vaughn Sills, photographer of Places for the Spirit, Traditional African American Gardens, and One Family

“‘The lines, the sweet curves. The way light hits the surface of a face’ observes the speaker, referencing her long-standing love affair with the art of sculpture (—all the while playing the instrument of assonant rhyme). But as this gorgeous marriage of text (prose poem) and image (photographs) is revealed, one senses that something else is in play. Yes, these pieces ‘tremble, they vibrate—’ But why? Because although the backdrop of this dual artistic journey is a global pandemic, one can’t (I couldn’t) escape that what is unfolding before our eyes and ears is a portrait of an artist (falling) in love: ‘[T]he way, when you smile, you always lift your chin, as if pleasure starts at the neck and travels upward to the mouth. Upward to your eyes.’ But what also felt true is that these photographic images were very deliberately placed, often offering this viewer an example of the visual experience depicted in the preceding text. As if, in the face of our mortalities, art and the possibility of love is what kept us going: ‘This is how we map our loss. All those beautiful curves.’”
—Francisco Aragón, author of After Rubén and Glow of Our Sweat

In The Scientific Method, Kim combines poems about Thomas Alva Edison and Carl Sagan, the strange mating habits of invertebrates and fish, and rondeaux about the United States presidents. She investigates the fascinating and tangled history of science, then applies that same precision to examine what it means to be Jewish and a resident of the American capital, Washington, D.C.

Reviews, Interviews, and Reprints from the Book

A review in Poet Lore by Anne Harding Woodworth (Fall/Winter 2018) states: “Roberts’s alertness to poetic forms and a keen sense of the absurd abound in this collection.” She praises the poems that uncover “science in all its different guides, personalities, theories, histories, triumphs, and errors.”

In an hour-long podcast for Writer’s Bone, Kim talks with Daniel Ford, Sean Tuohy, and Melanie Padgett Powers about The Scientific Method, her writing process, and how living in Washington, DC has influenced her poetry and her research. In light of the current presidential administration, she states, “Culture is more important than ever.” Published Oct. 9, 2017.

Kim was interviewed by Josephine Reed for ArtWorks, the podcast series of the National Endowment for the Arts, in May. She read poems and discussed her latest book, her background, and what inspires her poetry.

An excerpt of the title poem, “The Scientific Method: Chemistry Laboratory,” is featured in the Wick Poetry Center’s Traveling Stanzas project. Science Stanzas, curated by Jane Hirshfield, is a series of poems printed onto seven-foot banners, exhibited at the National March for Science in Washington, DC in May 2017. The poems are now traveling the US.

A review in Innisfree Poetry Journal by Mary-Sherman Willis (issue 25, Fall 2017) states: “Kim Roberts’s poems…are like canny experiments in lived life—hers, and those of the men and women who worked to study and codify the world around us. Think of the experimental lab report in science class, its empirical precision, its grounding in observation and measurement, its technical vocabulary, and you get a sense of this book. Add to that a series of ‘Eureka!’ moments of discovery and understanding. You will feel like you’re in the company of a smart museum docent who speaks in verse and has a sense of humor.”

A poem from the book, “Six,” was featured in Takoma Park, MD’s Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day in April 2017, and reprinted in Intersections: Poetry with Mathematics in Spetmber 2017. Another poem from the book, “Quebec Place NW, Park View neighborhood,” was featured in the Park View blog in April 2017 for National Poetry Month.

From a review in The Journal of Martinsburg, WV by Sonja James, March 2, 2017: “Kim Roberts’s The Scientific Method is a fascinating series of poems by one of D.C.’s finest poets. Roberts connects intellectual energy with historical insight in poems that reverberate with significance. Beautiful, bold, and passionate, these poems capture and celebrate the enduring nature of the human spirit. Roberts is magnificent.”

Read an interview with Kim by Grace Cavalieri (Washington Independent Review of Books, February 14, 2017) in which “the poet explains her endless fascination with science.”

Three poems from the book were reprinted in Origins Journal in February 2017.

Advance Praise

“Kim Roberts’s poetry uses a passionate microscope: it brings us into sudden intimate contact with the strange neighborhoods of the body, the mind, and of the living stone of the city.  The Scientific Method ranges from the body’s ‘dark grottoes’ of ‘small words / long forgotten’ in the hammer and anvil of the ear, to the moon of 1836, where ‘a race of flying men,’ were seen praying in ‘sapphire temples.’  With Elizabeth Bishop’s eye for vivid detail, Roberts shares the names for aluminum conductors, ‘lupine, valerian, narcissus,’ and the curious mineral threads of radiola: ‘spiked crowns, chandeliers and lobed planets.’  A book of wondrous discoveries, and luminous portraits.” —David Gewanter

“Kim Roberts is preeminent as a writer of ‘science poetry.’ The Scientific Method looks at icebergs, oysters, astronomy, chemistry, labs, T-cells—language immersed in the many fascinations of life on earth. There’s a fire inside this poetry where intrigue led to imagination, commanding the page with startling lines, esthetics, and tonal geography.   We have here a hallmark: intelligence and passion turning practical facts into poetic truths. This is a master work by a master poet.” —Grace Cavalieri

“With linguistic and formal diligence as well as wonder and curiosity, Kim Roberts has written a smooth-reading collection of poems that respects a reader’s intelligence without denying that we come to poems for more than scientific or historical data. This is a book that loves its terminology—Latin or otherwise. It also loves its humble questions—‘Is the chimney a chute of air […] Or is the chimney the bricks,//the mason’s careful art?’ And such questioning can be applied to poetry. What is the poem—the veracity of its elements or the alchemy? The Scientific Method’s answer is ‘both.’” —Kyle G. Dargan

Sample Poems

CASEUS

“How can anyone be expected to govern a country with 325 cheeses?”
—Charles de Gaulle

Caesar ate his first blue cheese
Just west of Rocquefort,
in the town of Saint-Affrique.
In Latin it was caseus,
which became cacio in Italian,
queso in Spanish, queijo
in Portuguese. Cheese.
The Roman farmer Columella
described how to get rennet
from the fourth stomach
of a lamb, how to add it
to fresh milk, how long to wait
for the milk to curdle,
how to press the whey out,
how to salt the curds until dry.
In The Odyssey, the Cyclops
drained his curds in wicker baskets
lining the walls of his cave.
The baskets gave the cheese
its form—in Greek formos—
in Italian formaggio, in French
fromage. Virgil ate fresh cheese
with chestnuts. The techniques
of ripening and airing, affinage,
are secrets passed down
thousands of years. Right now,
in some cave in France,
a farmer is carefully turning
each wheel, salting one side,
watching the mold emerge.

THE INTERNATIONAL FRUIT OF WELCOME

A pineapple is the perfect gift
to bring to a blind date.
A pineapple is like a blind date:
spiky and armored at first,
with the hope of sweetness inside.
A pineapple is the perfect housewarming gift.
You don’t have to wrap it,
it doesn’t spill inside your car.
It comes in its own house.
A pineapple is the perfect birthday gift.
You might prefer a coconut,
that planet molten at the core,
but the pineapple has a better hairdo,
better wardrobe; it never
goes out of style.
Think of all those historic houses
with pineapple bolsters, pineapple finials,
pineapples carved above lintels.
Such a sophisticated fruit:
every sailor wants one.

“…one of the best first books in my lifetime…Moving, passionate, insightful, these wonderful evocations of Eros should be appreciated by anyone interested—and who isn’t—in ‘the pressure of one body against another.'” —Bill Knott

“The passionate, sardonic voice in these poems is that of a woman who boldly roams the universe and offers us meditations on love, sex, and the gritty mysteries of being female.” —Minnie Bruce Pratt

Out of Print
Limited copies available; query the author for more information

Book Reviews

from Publisher’s Weekly:

“This promising first book offers an eccentric commentary on love, sex and family. Roberts has a dexterous poetic voice, one that either tells a story or, better yet, disappears behind the story, allowing you to enter it. Roberts also has a keen ability to spot the perfect metaphor…Roberts lets her cadenced poetic voice carry the poem, allowing it to find its own language and story line. These poems comprise the lucky side of the wishbone.”

from Letter Ex: Chicago’s Poetry Newsmagazine by Gregg Shapiro:

“This uncommonly original and spirited book of poems is as bountiful as the universe itself. It is divided into three diverse sections, each of which bristles with a kind of glorious energy…There is a delightfully subversive list quality to the poems ‘Imagine This’ and ‘Darwin in Reverse,’ like layers being delicately but deliberately peeled away. The mother in ‘Mother’ is a female horseshoe crab and a sharp metaphor at that. While the daughter in ‘Daughter’ comes face to face with the real father who failed her and the dream father she created on the page…All in all, this book is an astronomical debut. Next time you look up at the stars, the one shining brightest might be a poet named Kim Roberts.”

Sample Poem

HOW TO IMAGINE DEAFNESS

Darken your ears until the tunnels
with their intricate clockwork
are sheathed in pitchy calm.
Hum a little blue, to yourself,

but keep it secret.  The small bones
will dip delicately, like willow leaves
that merely brush the water’s surface,
in their repose.  The small hairs

will lie down together like tentacles.
Listen: the lake stops its lapping
repetition of sibilance
(physicist, Sisyphus, sassafras)

and the great snail unfurls itself,
stretches its tongue longingly
toward the distant echo surge
that must be the heart.

The Kimnama is a masala of history, culture, and personal transformation.  Scene4 Magazine calls it “…a Whitmanesque long poem…[that] makes the reader viscerally smell, hear, touch and see the streets, mosques, gods, vehicles, shopping malls and slums of New Delhi…”

Book Reviews

From The Montserrat Review by Ethan Fischer:

“Lapidary verses vary with brisk evocation of streets, shops, and voices. Roberts devotes her lean book to vast India not only from her vantage point as traveler but from the eyes, ears, and tongues of Indians; their timeless spirit shines despite imperial edicts or raids by sacred cows…Passages echo and resonate as lines twine around streets or recline on roofs or ride camels or eat spicy meals or greet children or trace a god’s smile.”

From The Alsop Review by Cheryl Snell:

“The language throughout is elegant and precise, and the short swinging lines reinforce the idea of passage, for me. Musical repetitions, the use of opposites, and the theme of connection, recall Whitman–especially ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ or ‘Prayer to Columbus.'”

 

Book Excerpt

A fruit market on spindly wooden stand
is built by the side of the road.
Next to the melons,

a barber lifts his knife,
his client’s face
full of white lather.

A clump of laughing women
in a rainbow of saris
crosses the street.

Japanese Maruti vans honk
past ancient Ambassador cabs
built like tanks.

A man clad in a bright pink turban
and an orange scarf
around his neck smiles without teeth.

The market vendor deposits
red onion skins in the gutter
and three cows gather,

push their noses deep in rich reddish-purple,
stopping traffic,
as if they knew they were gods.

A connected series of blank verse sonnets written in the voice of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who led the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition of 1910-1913.  Based on Scott’s actual journals, this book recreates the Heroic Era of polar exploration, before the advent of modern transportation, communications or mechanical technologies.

Advance Praise

“Fortune’s Favor, the ironic title of Kim Roberts’s fine recreation of Scott’s second expedition to Antarctica, is perfect for the book’s combination of high courage and terrible luck. Though we may know the story, its retelling in disciplined, beautifully descriptive verse brings it to startling life.”
—Linda Pastan

“’The sea stood up and soon we found/ourselves in steady plunge.’ Thus speaks Robert Falcon Scott, Antarctic explorer in ‘Stormy Seas,’ which opens Kim Roberts’s arresting sequence of poems—compressed epic that chronicles an expedition to the South Pole. And ‘plunge’ is apt—immediately I found myself immersed in the macro (‘Thoughout the winter, ice sheets move and twist,/they tear apart and press up into ridges’) and the micro (‘He couldn’t walk, a wild look in his eyes.’) elements of this renowned story, both ill-fated and moving, in which five men, tight-knit (‘It’s quite impossible to speak too well/of my companions’), push forward on a journey that tests the limits of human endeavor.”
—Francisco Aragón

“Kim Roberts has uncovered the poetic beauty of the ‘stiff upper lip’ resolve found in the journals of polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott. The story of his tragic second expedition to the South Pole has seldom been told with such formal control, flashes of color, and suspense. In Fortune’s Favor, Roberts has created sonnets as ‘unrivaled and sublime’ as Antarctica’s Mt. Erebus itself—Brava!”

—Reginald Harris

Reviews

In Polar Research, Dr. Kevin McGrath calls the book “a small and succinct triumph in delineating the tragic course of Scott’s team” that is “highly distinct and authentic.” He continues: “Science is inferential and rational, poetry is inspired and metaphorical: Roberts merges these two intellectual forms by deriving her own experience—what in fact becomes the book—from the written logbook of the explorer, as she re-enacts his voice and thought; there is thus a double textuality at work here…The work is a slight but wonderful tribute to humanity’s endeavour towards the acquisition of empirical knowledge in the face of terrific natural duress.”

In Prick of the Spindle, C.L. Bledsoe writes: “Roberts’ presentation of the journey juxtaposes the bravery of the men with their sacrifices and eventual deaths…They attempted something audacious, and in a sense, they succeeded by capturing the imaginations of a country and people all over the world.”

In The Washington Independent Review of Books, Grace Cavalieri praises the book’s “20 perfect sonnets” as “a groundbreaking piece of history of science in verse.” She continues, “The words that come to mind while reading this are ‘humility’ and ‘honesty.’ Never does Roberts stretch a glide to sensationalize an already dramatic circumstance. She shows the surface of events and lets the facts reveal the depth of what’s at stake. No showboating. No making matters better or worse. Just finding the right emotional vocabulary to tell the story cleanly and imagistically. The end result is that we experience rather than watch. Detailed and inventive, these are highly charged well made verses that not only reveal what happened on our geographic globe, but extend poetry’s globalization as well.”

Chosen for the Pearl Poetry Prize by Debra Marquart, Animal Magnetism “investigates, in language as rich, complex, and nuanced as the body itself, the unlit interiors of physical and emotional anatomy.”

Marquart continues: “Borne out of the author’s own deep searching following a serious illness, each poem, each line, feels deeply earned…While these poems are beautifully-made and sometimes funny or painful, they are also brimming with information…Here the narrator functions as a trained docent, leading the reader on a private tour of the wonders and curiosities that document the early explorations of medicine and anatomy, in which the inner workings of the human body were first opened to the human eye.”

Book Reviews

From The Hollins Critic, by Elizabeth Poliner:

“The fact of illness, Roberts’s own and that of a dear friend for whome she cared and to who in death this collection is dedicated, quietly winds its way through the lines of these observant, poignant poems…Juxtaposed brilliantly with her poems inspired by exhibits at medical museums is a poetic series entitled ‘My Imaginary Husband.’ Marriage, the poet reminds us as she describes her fantasy husband’s testicles (“Husband, someone packed your groceries poorly”), his curly hair (“soft half-moons”), or how he likes to cook breakfast (“in nothing but underwear”) is a most intimate union of two bodies. Often hilarious, and bursting with original imagery (“[e]ach night your stocks accrue/a deep and dreamless sleep/spooning next to my bonds”), the poems in this series, on the surface so distinct from the medical poems, nevertheless continue to explore the human body–as exposed and vulnerable in marriage, the poems suggest, as when on formal display at museums.”

From Rattle, by Mike Maggio:

“Animal Magnetism takes the reader on an unexpected and fascinating tour – a tour of the human body via an exploration of unusual museums and peculiar collections of medical memorabilia. From Philadelphia to Florence, from London to Istanbul, the poems in the collection escort us on a curious journey and, like a lyrical ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not!,’ present us with an amalgamation of the odd and the amazing while, at the same time, exploring physical frailty and the limitations of the human body.”

Sample Poems

ANIMAL MAGNETISM
Discovered by Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815)

Come, Doctor,
with your iron rods,
your magnetized water,
and bathe me. Touch me
with your fingertips,
and spark my animal essence.
Tune the fluid of my soul.

Across planetary space
electricity leaps,
the vital ether that sustains
our human organs.
In balance, the soul transmits
freely an ecstatic song.
Unbalanced, the ether
loses its harmony, harbors
sickness and decay.

I want to be healed!
Bring on your devices,
strap me in your wires. Bewitch.
Make the dry channels surge
as they once did, call down
the very powers of the black planets.
Mesmerize me.

THE APOTHECARY DOLL
The National Museum of Health and Medicine, Washington, DC

Nearly four feet tall, the woman,
carved from wood,
painted and waxed,

has bendable joints.
Beneath the wooden
nipples

her flesh has been stripped
to reveal removable organs,
liver, kidney, colon, all —

painted mauve and ruby and ocher
and labeled carefully
in kanji.

What magic do you hoard, woman,
what secret lore
in your ankles and knuckles,

in your jape and joke,
your vapor?
The face is calm, eyes

open, but not too wide,
eyelids giving
a languorous gaze

that must have reassured
the clients who came
to point at where they hurt,

hoping a pill or salve
the apothecary mixed
in his wide-mouthed alabaster mortar

could relieve the pains
in their own chests,
return them to their days—

like wooden shapes so neatly classed,
so precisely ordered—
healed and whole.