Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Cold and the Rust
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://emilyvankley.com/
CITY: Olympia
STATE: WA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016091948
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016091948
HEADING: Van Kley, Emily
000 00660cz a2200169n 450
001 10206686
005 20170630135301.0
008 160713n| azannaabn |a aaa c
010 __ |a no2016091948
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca10523259
040 __ |a FU |b eng |e rda |c FU |d DLC
053 _0 |a PS3622.A5854939
100 1_ |a Van Kley, Emily
375 __ |a female
400 1_ |a Kley, Emily van
670 __ |a Soil dwellers, 2015: |b title page (Emily Van Kley, Melanie Valera, Catherine Alice Michaelis, Emilie Bess) ; colophon (poems by Emily Van Kley
670 __ |a The cold & the rust, 2018: |b ECIP t.p. (Emily Van Kley) data view (grew up in Marquette, Michigan, and now lives in Olympia, Washington)
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Eastern Washington University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet. Former teacher of English at high school and college levels.
AVOCATIONS:Working at a cooperative grocery, aerial acrobatics.
AWARDS:Editor’s Prize, Florida Review, 2009; Iowa Review Award, 2011; Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, Georgia Review, 2015; Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, Persea Books, 2017, for The Cold & the Rust.
WRITINGS
Author of poems in the collaborative art piece “Soil Dwellers,” music composed by Melanie Valera; book design by Catherine Alice Michaelis; other content by Emily Bess, May Day Press (Shelton, WA), 2015. Work represented in anthologies, including Discoveries: New Writing from the Iowa Review, edited by Russell Scott Valentino, Iowa University Press, 2012; The Way North: Collected Upper Michigan New Works, edited by Ron Reikki, Wayne State University Press (Detroit, MI), 2013; Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, edited by Ron Reikki, Michigan State University Press (East Lansing, MI), 2015; And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, edited by Ron Reikki, Michigan State University Press, 2017; and Best American Poetry, edited by Natasha Trethewey, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2017. Contributor of poems to periodicals, including Barrow Street, Crab Orchard Review, Floating Bridge Review, Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Narrative, Nimrod, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and Salamander.
SIDELIGHTS
Poet Emily Van Kley was raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a unique landscape separated from the rest of the state by nothing more solid than a long, four-lane suspension bridge. The separation fostered the evolution of a self-sufficient population. The harsh winters and limited career opportunities deterred all but the determined few. Van Kley writes of those who stayed, survived the chronic economic decline, and developed a heartfelt connection the place they called home. She is one of them.
Van Kley moved to the state of Washington, but her affection for her childhood home is reflected in the poetry collection The Cold & the Rust, with a few caveats. She told the author of Deborah Kalb Books that “love is understood to encompass confusion, bleakness, estrangement, and other complex emotional states.” She writes with nostalgia for the bleak winter landscape, the abandoned mineshafts, the struggle for survival of the creatures who dwell alongside and within the unforgiving waters of Lake Superior. Van Kley also recalls the beauty of the forests, the excitement of the deer hunt, and the intensity of nature unleashed. At the same time, she writes of the people who shaped her formative years: her parents, a local waitress in a tourist town, a security guard in a snowy parking lot, a high school volleyball coach.
In an assessment at Harvard Review Online, Zack Anderson observed: “The Cold and the Rust embraces the paradoxes of those who inhabit the Great Lakes Region.” The author “alternates moments of humor with instances of darkness and melancholy,” a Publishers Weekly contributor noted. She juxtaposes estrangement and nostalgia, strength and fragility. Anderson volunteered: “One of the book’s strengths lies in the way that Van Kley explores Michigan’s distinct topographies while attending to the intersections of rurality, whiteness, sexuality, and class.” He concluded: “Ultimately this serves as both an acknowledgment of nostalgia for one’s home and a recognition of nostalgia’s futility.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2018, review of The Cold & the Rust, p. 51.
ONLINE
Deborah Kalb Books, http://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/ (May 9, 2018), author interview.
Emily Van Kley website, https://emilyvankley.com (June 15, 2018).
Harvard Review Online, http://harvardreview.org/ (June 19, 2018), Zack Anderson, review of The Cold & the Rust.
Emily Van Kley was raised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula but now lives with her partner in Olympia, Washington, where she writes, works at a cooperative grocery, practices aerial acrobatics, and nurses a near-pathological longing for snow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications and anthologies, including The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The Mississippi Review, Best New Poets 2013, and Best American Poetry 2017. Emily holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and has taught composition and creative writing at the high school and college levels. Her first poetry collection is The Cold and the Rust, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize.
Here’s an interview with Siblíní Art & Literature Journal.
Or listen to an interview with Olympia Pop Rocks (segment at 14:12).
Publications
Poem, “Waste Recovery,” (forthcoming) Gulf Coast, 2018.
Poem, “Houseboat”, (forthcoming) Poetry Northwest, 2018.
Poems, “Nonsomnolent,” “Lodgepole,” (forthcoming) SpoKe Poetry Annual, 2018.
Poem, “Hunting Season,” Poem of the Week, Narrative Magazine, Feb 19, 2018.
Poems, “Introduction (At least once…),” “Dusk,” “Introduction (At first I thought…)”, “Dénouement,” RADAR, 2017/18.
Poem, “Electromagnetic,” (forthcoming) Barrow Street, Winter 2017.
Poem, “The Scientist Who Reveals…” 32 Poems, Summer 2017.
Poem, “Dear Skull,” Best American Poetry, Natasha Trethewey, ed., 2017.
Poems, “Semen,” “Spitshine,” Prairie Schooner, Summer 2017.
Poem, “bitches,” And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, Ron Reikki, ed., Michigan State UP, 2017.
Poem, “Memorial,” Washington 129. Tod Marshall, ed. Sage Hill Press, 2017.
Poems, “Cover Stories” “Introduction,” “Span” Nimrod, Fall/Winter 2016
Poems, “Bodies,” “Vector,” “Break In,” “The Violence,” “Knock Knock,” “It’s Winter,” “Proposal,” in Not A Single Cell Stand Still, poetry/visual art collaboration with Sonja Dahl, 7×7.la, March 2016.
Poem, “Dear Skull,” Georgia Review, spring 2016.
Essay, On Distance, Essay Daily, Ander Monson, ed., Oct 2015.
Poems, “Surface, Collembola Vernacular, Nomeclatural Acts, Animal Mineral Vegetable,” Soil Dwellers, Artist Book collaboration with Emilie Bess, Catherine Alice, & Melanie Valera, August 2015.
Poems, “Superior, Varsity Athletics, Until the Heavens Ring,” Nimrod, Fall/Winter 2015.
Poem, “Rules of the Game” (forthcoming) Knockout Literary Magazine, 2015.
Poems, “Vital Signs, Not in the Same Way Again,” Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Ron Riekki, ed. Michigan State UP, spring 2015.
Poem, “Lacustrine,” Crab Orchard Review, fall/winter 2015.
Poem, “Not in the Same Way Again,” in Floating Bridge Review, summer 2014.
Poem, “Take Care, I Love You,” in Rock & Sling, spring 2014.
Poems, “Ways to Hunt Deer,” “My Father’s Datebook,” in The Way North: Collected Upper Michigan New Works, Ron Reikki, ed. Wayne State UP, 2013.
Poem, “My Dead Grandfather,” in The Far Field, Kathleen Flenniken, ed, 2013.
Poem, “ After Winter,” in Discoveries: New Writing from the Iowa Review, Russell Scott Valentino, ed. Iowa UP , 2012.
Poem, “Not in the Same Way Again,” in Mississippi Review, summer 2012.
Poems, “You Aren’t Sure & I May Not,” “After Winter, “My Dead Grandfather,” “Weight Training,” “Menstrual,” “Premises,” in The Iowa Review, winter 2011.
Story, “Old Machines,” in Salamander, winter 2010.
Poems, “Before Ghosts,” “Last of the Month,” “Vital Signs,” in The Florida Review, winter 2009.
Poem, “Parsimony,” in Oberon, 2009.
Poem, “Red and Rojo,” in Cutthroat, spring 2009.
Story , “Scrap Metal,” in The Republic of Letters, spring 2007 .
Story, “Wheat Dust,” in Faultline, Spring 2005.
Honors
Second place in the Tucson Book Festival Literary Awards, 2017.
Finalist for Coniston Prize, 2017.
Finalist for Narrative Poetry Prize, 2017.
Poem chosen for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017.
Winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize (Persea Books), 2017.
Finalist for Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, 2016.
Finalist for Backwaters Prize, 2016.
Winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize (The Georgia Review), 2015.
Honorable Mention for Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, 2015.
Manuscript named semi-finalist for Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Poetry Prize, 2015.
Poem chosen for inclusion in Best New Poets 2013.
Manuscript named runner-up for Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize, 2013.
Winner of the Iowa Review Award, 2011.
Winner of the Florida Review Editor’s Prize 2009 .
Semi-finalist for River Styx International Poetry Contest, 2013.
Finalist for Mississippi Review Award, 2012.
Honorable Mention for Salamander Fiction Prize, 2010.
Finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Prize, 2011.
Finalist for Narrative Magazine’s Below 30 Award, 2009.
Honorable Mention for the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, 2009.
Honorable Mention for the Oberon Poetry Prize 2009.
Contact
cropped-p1200530.jpgFor inquiries about readings or other matters, please email emilyjvankley (at) gmail (dot) com
Emily Van Kley
Emily Van Kley’s poems have appeared in Nimrod, the Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Best New Poets 2013, among others. She is also a recipient of the Iowa Review Award and the Florida Review Editor’s Award. Her most recent project is an exchange of poems and images with the textile artist Sonja Dahl for 7x7.
Emily Van Kley
WORKS THAT HAVE APPEARED IN NARRATIVE:
Hunting Season, poetry, in Poems of the Week: 2017–2018
Emily Van Kley, a finalist in Narrative’s Ninth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of the collection The Cold and the Rust Smell (Persea, 2018), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her work has also been included in the anthologies Best New Poets 2013 and Best American Poetry 2017. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and lives with her partner in Olympia.
Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb
Check back often for new Q&As, and for daily historical factoids about books. On Facebook at www.facebook.com/deborahkalbbooks. Follow me on Twitter @deborahkalb.
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Q&A with Emily Van Kley
Emily Van Kley is the author of the new poetry collection The Cold and the Rust. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Prairie Schooner and Narrative Magazine. She was raised in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and she lives in Olympia, Washington.
Q: The Magazine’s review of your new poetry collection called it a “queer lovesong to the Midwest.” What do you think of that characterization?
A: I think it’s an apt description, so long as <
Also, Upper Michigan, where most of the poems are set, is definitely a unique and isolated place within the Midwest; the book dwells pretty strongly in its specifics, so those hoping for an ode to Indiana or Kansas are likely to be disappointed.
That said, I’m aware it’s easy to make a fuss over relatively small distinctions when it comes to places one is especially familiar with—I frequently try to draw distinctions between U.P. and Minnesota accents when talking with folks in the Pacific Northwest where I now live, and I’m not sure any of them buy it.
Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in your collection?
A: I’ve been working on some of these poems for nearly 10 years, though several are more recent, of course. I am a pretty slow writer; it nearly always takes months or years for me to be satisfied with a poem.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the poems would be arranged?
A: Honestly, this was the hardest part of writing the book for me. I changed the order and sectioning of this book at least a dozen times over the years, and the final form owes a great debt to a friend of mine who read the manuscript and made recommendations I mostly followed when I was ready to throw up my hands.
Q: Which poets do you especially admire?
A: I admire so many poets! One of the wonderful things about being published by Persea Books has been getting to know many of the other folks whose work the press puts out.
Of my pressmates, I have most recently been reading Randall Mann, Molly McCully Brown, Mitchell L. H. Douglas, Patrick Rosal, Alexandra Teague, and Kimberly Grey, and have loved their work wholeheartedly.
I also adore the work of Brenda Shaunessy, Danez Smith, Eduardo Corral, Solmaz Sharif, Mary Jo Bang, Natalie Diaz, and so very many more.
I am currently reading my former professor Christopher Howell’s Love’s Last Number, which is characteristically gorgeous and sad. My friend Kat Smith recently put out this strange and wonderful little book The Book of Exodus, which I admire for its economy and insight, and another former professor and friend, Jonathan Johnson, is one of the most generous and encouraging poet-mentors I know.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a poetry manuscript that explores technology, death, and gender/sexuality issues. Its tentative title is In the Event All Instructions Have Been Lost.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: The Cold and the Rust is my first book, and I’m hugely grateful to all the folks who have been reading and reviewing it, sharing it with their friends, teaching it in their classes, and otherwise helping it have a life out there in the world. Thanks to you, Deborah, for your interest in my work.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
The Cold and the Rust
Publishers Weekly.
265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p51.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Cold and the Rust
Emily Van Kley. Persea, $15.95 trade paper
(88p) ISBN 978-0-89255-488-1
Van Kley imbues her sharp debut collection with the complex, wistful nostalgia an outsider feels for her hometown. In her case home is on
Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the themes referenced in the book's title are pervasive throughout. Van Kley skillfully captures the local
topography, with its "Flooded mine buildings thrusting their acidy tongues/ down// and down," and "the frozefish tang / of Superior mawing the
harbor." The work is punctuated by small moments that open onto a wider narrative: a Kmart security guard detains a "reedy punk" shoplifting a
CD; a server suppresses disdain for her restaurant's tourist clientele; and a woman succumbs to despondency after a bar fight with her husband,
realizing that "dreams are only pimped// impossibilities, postscript overtures." Van Kley <
sculptures of themselves,// orange scales undimmed/ eyes caught bored-open," she writes. Van Kley precisely captures the deathly pall of a
Midwestern winter in this remarkably vivid exploration of how it feels to leave home and then return. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Cold and the Rust." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 51. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357501/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4c2e344c. Accessed 4 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357501
miscellaneous reviews:
Persea Books
https://www.perseabooks.com/the-cold-and-the-rust/
The Cold and the Rust
Emily Van Kley
Winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry
A tender portrait of a queer girlhood on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In this lyrical and unflinching debut, a landscape of staggering beauty abuts industrial towns in the throes of economic decay. Emily Van Kley explores notions of home, estrangement, isolation, and longing against a backdrop of crystalline winters, Lake Superior’s mythic tempers, and forests as vast as they are close.
=====
Harvard Review Online
http://harvardreview.org/
reviewed by Zack Anderson
June 5, 2018
Beginning with its title, Michigander Emily Van Kley’s debut collection The Cold and the Rust pits the reader against two elemental forces: one sterile and unflinchingly nonhuman, the other demonstrating vitality even while it corrodes. Van Kley sources her title from a passage in “Premises” in which the speaker, in her role as Kmart security guard, wrestles a “reedy punk” to the ground: “The kid’s nose / bloodied against packed snow / and ice: accidental. The cold / and the rust smell.” Through its dyads of cold and rust, bullet and animal, beauty and violence, “Premises” lays the groundwork for a book that circles the idea of a “hometown,” albeit with a critical eye on the abrasions of rural, white, working-class, heteronormative communities.
At first glance, The Cold and the Rust presents an easy dichotomy between the tenacity of the nonhuman and the fragility of the human. However, Van Kley’s poems often reveal a precarious intersubjectivity between the two. In one of the book's most arresting poems, “Lacustrine,” the speaker witnesses the resurrection of the family goldfish, found frozen in their tanks after a vacation:
Our pets
terrible sculptures of themselves,
orange scales undimmed,
eyes caught bored-open
in the midst of their daily
ministrations, black suckerfish
printed like apostrophes
to the tank’s sides.
Released from their icy stasis, the fish swim to the surface. Their lack of “reason to doubt / the heavens would open // & food begin to fall” serves as an uncomfortable reminder of the incidental violence that mediates the interspecies relationships that appear throughout the collection.
Perhaps no symbol better encompasses the difficult entanglements of capitalism, violence, and landscape than the sea lamprey, an image that dominates the poem “Superior.” In this poem, Van Kley casts the lamprey as the foil to the ancient lake sturgeon on which it preys. An invasive species, lamprey entered the Great Lakes in the late 19th century as a result of newly constructed shipping channels. They survive through parasitism, typically causing the death of their native host. “Superior” takes as guiding symbols the intrusive, alien lamprey and the stoic but doomed lake sturgeon. In a series of parallel narratives, Van Kley addresses her parents’ arrival in Lake Superior from the “Sioux Center trailer they abandoned,” as well as the slow demise of industry in the region. By the end of the poem, the speaker’s parents “became // as those who lived at water’s edge, / who dressed in sheepskin mittens // & boiled wool mufflers, / shoveled snow regardless of heart // conditions, & didn’t make / a fuss out of waiting for spring.” However, the poem thrives on Van Kley’s trademark reticence, refusing to disclose whether the tenacity of the humans in the poem resembles the lamprey or the sturgeon.
In the strictly human realm, <
the storm canceling specificity,
mounding street signs, parked
cars, liquor bottles
tossed along the sidewalk,
blanketing my little blooming
faggot’s heart.
While elsewhere in the collection, winter seems like a hyperobject—too massive in scale and temporality to comprehend—here, it seems to re-center the speaker in a bodily certainty. The storm “cancel[s] specificity,” allowing the speaker to move inconspicuously through the city and reducing this world to the snow and the body within it. In the face of the heteronormative structures that surround the speaker, moments of relief occur in unmediated encounters between speaker and landscape: “my tracks // behind covered over, senses / scoured in lake-effect wind.”
To call The Cold and the Rust a paragon of regionalist writing would be unfair, as its scope and relevance extend far beyond the Great Lakes. And yet, <
How self-
important, the notion
that a place can be left,
a person return