Breakable Things

After the fracture, after the breaks in the surface, there is always light. Breakable Things is a testament to the idea that everything is breakable, and everything somehow finds its way back together again. Whether it's past, present, and future; falling in love and out; or darkness and light, life is full of beautiful contrasts. Loren Kleinman presents the world in breakable objects: bones, cabinets, hearts, sexuality, and more. She shows us that broken does not mean damaged, and that it's a necessary part in the process of becoming a whole person.
Here's what people are saying about Breakable Things:                Breakable Things is a rattling tribute to the fragility of consciousness and memory. "I'm cut on the floor, / porcelain in the skin, / and he breaks / he breaks he breaks he breaks me," Loren Kleinman writes. Fastened with pinching, deep detail, the shock of loss and a seasoned sense of being resonate throughout this book. Here Kleinman describes the bewilderment of being and the feelings that come from breathing, existing. "I step into the dirt. / Its dampness / makes me feel I exist." Caked with shame and smoke, soot and blinking bugs Kleinman renders a panorama of sharp, dazzling poems that haunt and captivate us long after the reading of this book is completed.  
 
--Geoffrey Gatza, Publisher, BlazeVOX [books]
 
 
With unpretentious clarity, guts and a bit of soul, Breakable Things has solidified Loren Kleinman as my favorite new poet.
 
--Kola Boof, The Sexy Part of the Bible, Akashic Books
 
[Breakable Things] has a visceral quality. The images and lines within these poems are precise and surprising--layered with texture. I was drawn in by the details and kept connected with the phrasing. There is a flow to this text, a common experience of relationships coupled with the unique perspective of being alone, which creates fascination within the reader. 


--   Jason Carney, author of Starve the Vulture, Kaylie Jones Books
 
Loren Kleinman's shining new collection of poems "Breakable Things" examines love and loss and renewal in its many faces. This is a collection, yes, where things are cracked and breaking, where people are "dressed in shame and smoke", but there are, as well, highly charged erotic poems that engages the fusing of not only bodies but of souls as well. There are poems of touching intimacy --- memorials and testimonials to mothers, lovers, children and friends, as well very sensual poems to the ocean, the moon and the love of various kinds of foods as in the gorgeous "Wildlife in my Kitchen." This is a collection where "Two boys" before our astonished eyes, "become butterflies" and then there is the truly outstanding, "Your Body is a Green Dress" that confronts and seeks to make sense of the atrocity of a sixteen year olds death at the hands of her classmate.  This is a raw, powerful collection of poems that deserves a place on all our bookshelves.

--    Jacqueline Bishop, founding editor of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Art & Letters; and author of The River's Song