In
Drift and Pulse, her third book of poems, Kathleen Halme is fascinated with the domain where matter is experienced as mind. Drawing upon brain science, anthropology, and biology, these poems take aim at the big questions of form and death. The persistent "longing for shapes as elegant as instinct," the rituals and fictions we invent to meet the needs of a ceaselessly revised universe animate the poems. Between "drift and pulse," the capacity for transcendent experience is expressed as a hard-wired process of human brain architecture.
Kathleen Halme grew up in Wakefield, a post-mining town in Michigan's upper peninsula. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where her work was awarded the Hopwood Creative Writing Award. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry and a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship in anthropology. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.
