Books

"Kathryn Gahl’s poems are filled with the sweet but hard liquor of life. With delicious details, she writes of domesticity, of rural living, of taverns and school busses, of grease guns and chainsaws. Details like “the sound the treetops/make when they touch the sky” and “… a cuddle-mad moon” show her skill as a wordsmith. For me, there is a deep resonance, especially with poems of her mother. They remind me of my mother and grandmother’s endless and often thankless work. Gahl is a poet of great skill and heart."

— Karla Huston: Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017—2018 and author of Grief Bone and A Theory of Lipstick, both winners of the Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award.

 

"There is a language unique to the rural Midwest, a language those who have lived its seasons and walked its fields can never leave behind, regardless of where life takes them. Kathryn Gahl’s, Hard Life, Hard Love, speaks this language through the common experiences of farm families and the work of farming. For all those who once called a Rural Route home, and for those who live there now, these poems capture the rural experience shared, and valued, by so many."

— Daniel Smith, author of Ancestral

 

"With Hard Life, Hard Love, Kathryn Gahl invites us into a farmhouse, its kitchen and porch, and she shares beans, tomatoes, and mice with her signature humor and unexpected turns of phrase. The oscillation among need, desire, and a desperation to avoid suffering is the marrow of Gahl’s poems, each of which tells a story, clear in details and concrete, yet more than one expects from simple moments with grilled cheese sandwiches."

— Emily Bowles, author of The Satisfactory Nothingness of Girls