The Next Infinity
Publisher: Broadstone Books (this volume now distributed by Wolfson Press)
by Nancy Botkin
paperback, 88 pages
2019
Reviews
“If I could just see the inside of my head. // If I could harvest the mind’s flutter,” muses Nancy Botkin in her stunning new collection, The Next Infinity. These remarkable poems explore the speaker’s early religious life, loss of her mother, and challenges of what it means to be more present and awake. But they don’t wallow; as she writes, “I say this life is hard, but we can’t set up a trading post for grief.” These poems transform loss and regret into generative vision, casting them as only part of what it means to become more fully human. Botkin knows “You can’t stop the whirring, the endless circles,” that “That’s the difficulty of this Earth” yet is wise enough to seek redemption in the human capacity to speak the toughening truths of the tongue: “Beautiful telescoping of a tongue / where innumerable stars wink / along the untamed ocean of flesh. // Impossible to avoid all the broken glass / hidden in the sand, but carry on dancing. // Carry on fumbling in the dark.” And carry on she does, bringing us with her. This is one of the most genuine, engaging collections I have read in some time. With imagistic brilliance and stirring associative leaps, Nancy Botkin maps for us possibilities of living more wholly in the ever-widening moment of “the next infinity.”
—George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016)
These poems brilliantly capture the joys, quotidian miseries, and terrors of living in human bodies and minds in the swirling midst of every kind of hunger, of mortality and infinity. Sensual, funny, witty, Botkin delights and surprises on every page. I want to spend more time with this poet capable of such alchemy, “an autopsy of infinity” and “the rain fell like feathers/on the silver casket.” When I step into the abyss, I want these poems to hold my hand.
—April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries
About the Author
Born in Detroit, Nancy Botkin earned a BA in English from Michigan State University and a Master of Liberal Studies from Indiana University South Bend. Her first full-length poetry collection, Parts That Were Once Whole (2007), included "Poem with Light and Dark," which won the Maize First Place Poetry Prize sponsored by the Writers' Center of Indiana. Her poetry has been published in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's column, "American Life in Poetry." Botkin's work has been published in various journals, such as Poetry, Poetry East, Laurel Review, and the American Literary Review. Her book The Honeycomb won the 2022 Steel Toe Books Chapbook Award. She is the judge of the annual chapbook contest sponsored by Wolfson Press at Indiana University South Bend, where she taught writing for many years. Now retired, she writes, makes collage art, and refinishes furniture in South Bend.