Selected from a pool of 289 entries, Kate’s chapbook poetry collection was published in fall 2015 by the very wonderful folks at Finishing Line Press in Kentucky. Kate could not have produced this collection without her students, colleagues, mentors and friends in the Sacramento and Davis literary communities, and she offers her sincerest gratitude to all who helped these poems find their way!
Support (& enjoy!) Kate’s work, Finishing Line Press & independent poetry–buy your copy today!
Want to get a copy, but can’t make the launch party & reading or other events? Email Kate at kate (at) kateasche (dot) com to arrange for purchase of a signed copy (buying directly from Kate allows her to earn a few dollars on the sale), or buy an unsigned copy from Avid Reader at Tower in Sacramento, or directly from Finishing Line Press. Either way, cost is $12.49 plus $3 shipping.
Want to check out some of the poems in the chapbook?
Watch the video of Kate’s launch reading for this collection!
Reviews and publicity
Our Day in the Labyrinth was reviewed by Linda Michel-Cassidy in Prick of the Spindle here. Read Kate’s first interview about the chapbook, published by Why There Are Words in Sausalito, CA.
Kate is interviewed Tuesday, November 3, 2015 on Capital Public Radio’s Insight with Beth Ruyak in the segment “The Chapbook: Yesterday’s Revolution, Today’s Renaissance.”
Learn more about the chapbook form as you listen to an audio recording of “The Chapbook Across Genres,” the panel Kate created and moderated at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference in 2016, featuring DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press’s Lawrence Lenhart, CutBank’s Josh Fomon and Finishing Line Press’s Elizabeth Maines. (Forgive the funky sound of the first 90 seconds!)
Praise
“A thread of transcendence weaves its way through Kate Asche’s illuminating debut collection—poems that explore both the phenomenal and noumenal worlds in relationship to intimacy. ‘In the twelfth century, ‘understanding’ was simply attention, listening,’ Asche tells us. In Our Day In The Labyrinth, she offers us the gift of her own determined attentiveness (and her willingness to push the boundaries of thought and poetic form) in order to understand those ‘discreet embodiments of specific intimacies’ with the Self and with an Other. ‘Deepness ends; there’s no place to go but in.’ What a pleasure to accompany Asche’s poems on their journey into and through this book.”
~Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of The Fortunate Islands
“In these beautifully crafted poems, delicacy and strength, compassion and love, sensuality, fear, hands and names seek their singular lives in one another, in am and am not, have and have not. In tender contemplation, the poet senses that everything is about to change; she is becoming not something else, but herself. She reveals that our departure rings in the vibrations that emanate from the inner life. We arise from the birth of the other, much in the way ‘fishes dispatch bliss.’ Remembering the first garden, we arrive at the many heavens and beyond the coastal mist see that we create ourselves and one another, the passage from life to death, from this life to ‘the true leaf.'”
~William O’Daly, poet, translator, and editor
“In her debut collection, Kate Asche displays a compendium of poetic verse, both prosaic and free form, to run the full gamut of her brilliance and passion. Kate’s poetry is seasoned, mature; a dazzling intellect expertly entwined with exquisite imagery. Dauntless and harrowing, Our Day in the Labyrinth is a delightful, yet all-too-short, guided tour through the harnessed musicality of a true poetic mind.”
~Indigo Moor, author of Through the Stonecutter’s Window and Tap-Root