Forthcoming June 2024 from YesYes Books
TELL THIS TO THE UNIVERSE
“I don’t know / how to reach you, and wondering / takes up all my time.” There is an absence at the heart of Tell This to the Universe, Katie Prince’s debut collection—and the obsessive search to find what’s missing propels the reader through a dizzying multiverse of poems that are equal parts sincere, darkly funny, absurd, and devastating. Like moons around faraway planets, the poems orbit the strange and brutal landscapes of longing, alienation, and grief, neither able to escape nor land.
How do we make sense of suffering? Do other worlds exist? Are we each truly alone, or does it just feel that way? These are the kinds of questions Tell This to the Universe is interested in asking. The poems in this collection bounce from physics to philosophy, linguistics to mathematics, fairy tales to science fiction, all in pursuit of a mysterious, ever-elusive you that lurks somewhere out of reach, a black hole at the center of an immense galaxy. It could be said this book is trying to find god—to name it, to hurt it or hold it, to make desperate demands of it—but it’s just as true to say it’s looking for a home, or a family, or an answer to a question it still doesn’t know how to ask.