My public library is not a very good one. Once I was at the desk to take out a few books and I was stopped and scolded for not returning a book. I knew I had returned it because I did not want to return it. I went to the stacks and found it and handed it to the clerk so I could take out more books then she scolded me again to say I should not have just walked to the stacks and taken it off the shelf myself, but I knew exactly where it was because it always made me feel better to walk by it.
Since then they got rid of aisles and aisles of books for what I do not know. Maybe a pickleball court. The book I loved and did not want to return is gone.
So it was weird to be browsing the New Releases shelves and find a hip looking book with the 811.6 call number.
Books of poems, you know, I am never averse to opening in the middle. When I was young I read so many selections, collections and compilations. I was ecomonical and bought the single greatest hits for each poet I could versus really reading and understanding that a single book of poems should have a theme and arc, etc. New Releases poetry books especially must have this special whole book like quality. That is something that I am paying attention to now.
I opened the new release with its rough and lightly speckled ivory cardstock cover. I recognized the publisher from a poetry book I had read and written about recently.
The poem I opened to had a shape that explained everything without words. I could take my glasses off and see the shape and understand the poem.
That book was the only thing that mattered to me at that moment. I brought the book everywhere with me. The moment lasted awhile.
CAConrad made these poems not by forcing or trying or experimenting. But by listening.
CAConrad took away all extraneous caps and punctuation and in plain diction gave shapes to love, death, losing the remote, queerness, the Rapture and America.
But it is that shapeliness! Not forced, but organically true to the words in an accretional way, like stalactites sometimes, like mammalian critters poking their heads from the earth sometimes, like smoke, sometimes.
CAConrad’s work has been shown in galleries as visual art, just as they are on the page, just bigger. Black and white, no embellishments. It makes so much sense.
Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books, 2024) ends with an essay with some photos, and it is a beautiful ride to join this eccentric human journey. The author communed with a crow from an apartment window in Seattle during COVID. So much tenderness requires weirdness, too. There is a grainy photo of each of the gifts the crow bestowed the author. Each poem when it takes its turn or sometimes two is as delightful and unexpected as the crow leaving them a piece of cat food or gold foil.
There is no real way to explicate or quote these poems. The only way is to show one in full. I hope Wave Books thinks that is ok, too. So here is one:
The book’s back cover has a quote that along with a couple of Oblique Strategies cards is helping me to stay alive to myself. (of course you know what I am talking about america.) 
The elegy is to time itself. CAConrad and I are both 58 years old. We remember Reagan and people dying of AIDS.
Eventually after so many auto-renews, a COVID era accommodation, I had to return the book to the library. I couldn’t live without it so I bought it. But that powerful time when we bonded and became friends and I understood that poems are living things, as alive as my pets and plants and who deserve as much care.
I found out CAConrad is sort of famous in certain circles and travels the world with ease. I am not that sort. We have nothing in common. We would have nothing to say to each other at all. I would be star struck.
Karin Falcone Krieger’s recent writing appears in BlazeVOX Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Moonlighting, The Decadent Review, Tofu Ink, Hunger Mountain, and in the anthology, “A physical book which compiles conceptual books”. She writes Wild Working Gardens, a weekly newsletter about gardening by the moon. She occasionally types poems made to order for wonderful strangers on her vintage typewriters. These and other projects can be seen at www.karinfalconekrieger.com.