Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary

Poetry. This book, winner of the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, takes flight from Plato's Theaetetus, in which Socrates tells us that the mind works as an aviary--particles of knowledge fly around like birds, and the thinker plucks them down to use when he or she sees fit. The bird becomes a metaphor for the action of the mind folding and unfolding into explosions and navigational patterns of flight. Lyrical and thought-provoking, it is a masterful debut. "Kelsey writes what it is to know, of 'what we become/ when the universe is seen in lights of its generation.' We are, in this work, in the midst of things, and as Plato's Socrates has it, 'the eye becomes filled with vision and now sees, and becomes, not vision but a seeing eye.'"--Carolyn Forche.