After years of translating and presenting other writers, Kathleen Weaver has now produced a collection of her own poems. Too Much Happens mingles personal and major social concerns in order to give voice to a sense of urgent solicitude for a world straining under the pressure of manifold crises. Catastrophic wars, child soldiers, dried lake beds—the poet asks, “What shall we do with what we know?” Too Much Happens poses a question for which no answer is clear in a world skirting a perilous edge.
Kathleen Weaver
Praise for Too Much Happens
“Days, slaves to the sun, / the sun herds them into shadows. // A valley fills with traveled light / and snowmelt.” Once you step in between these lines, you know you’ve reached home: heart-and-mind, the body-and soul of why poetry matters. Nearly one of a kind, Kathleen Weaver lyrically weaves love and social awareness with language. To a cyber-bashed, corporatized, red-lit planet prison, her bright voice rejoices in green-lights.
— Al Young
The poems in this book move simultaneously toward clarity and compassion, traveling through geological time to achieve a perspective in which the contemporary world’s cruelties and depredations can be faced, free of rhetoric and posturing, with an ascetic, often witty justice.
— Alissa Valles
A profoundly brilliant book of poems in which fragmentation and estrangement are the sustaining features… Kathleen Weaver braves the zone of non-existence and emerges with her own refusal to be disappeared, even though goodbye is one of the central themes of a life that, though in splints, cannot be mended because it is the brokenness that is paradoxically the affirmation she hopes to evoke.
— Jack Hirschman
