Distributed by YesYes Books and Ingram
Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
Cover Art: “The Opening, 2021” by Aleah Chapin
Author Photo: Gabriel Moseley
$18 | 108 pages | ISBN: 978-1-936919-98-7
Poetry l Perfectbound | June 11, 2024
Praise for Tell This to the Universe
The poems in Tell This to the Universe, Katie Prince’s arresting debut, navigate the failures of human language with paradoxical grace and beauty, revealing the power of words in the exploration of their limitations. They are sublime love letters to ephemerality and decay both vast and infinitesimal, to a reality in which we blink and our “bodies become cities/ become collections of bones and trash and buildings”: a chaotic world moving, changing, and dying faster than our words can hope to capture it.
—Sara Eliza Johnson, author of Bone Map
Katie Prince is a poet who writes exquisitely and breathlessly about the cosmos—its presence in her experience and world of ice and loss. Prince is a fearlessly imaginative poet, a wielder of absurdist humor and heartbreaking lyricism, physics, and philosophical thought. At their heart, her poems contend with loss and with how strange it is that we are here at all, the reality and unreality of it.
—Malena Mörling, author of Astoria
Tell This to the Universe
Tell This to the Universe is Here!
“In whatever she does on the page, Katie Prince practices a subtle, omnipresent cadence of syllables so physically pleasing as to cause a blush.” —Foreword Reviews
About Tell This to the Universe
There is an absence at the heart of Katie Prince’s debut collection, Tell This to the Universe, and an obsessive search to find what’s missing. Like moons around faraway planets, the poems orbit the strange and brutal landscapes of longing, alienation, and grief as they move through physics to philosophy, linguistics to mathematics, fairy tales to science fiction. It could be said that this book is trying to find god—to name it, to hurt it or hold it, to make desperate demands of it—but it’s just as true to say it’s looking for a home, a family, an answer to a question it still doesn’t know how to ask.
About the Author
Katie Prince is a poet and essayist. Her first poetry book, Tell This to the Universe, was a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series and won the 2021 Pamet River Prize from YesYes Books. In the spring of 2017, she served as artist-in-residence at Klaustrið, in Iceland’s Fljótsdalur valley, and in 2019, she received a GAP Award from Artist Trust to continue working on the project she began there. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has been published in Electric Literature, New South, Fugue, the Adroit Journal, and Poetry Northwest, among others. You can find her online at www.katieprince.com.
