“Life ought to be more incantatory, more autumnal like both / Of us,” Anastasia K. Gates writes in this folio featured by Tupelo Quarterly. Through her poetry we find ourselves beholding the miracles of the “buried sun,” the world “donned the / Color of thrushes,” and the intimacy of “I, your tameless, brightly in the night.” Her poetry reincarnates a time past and communes with the dead. To enter the dreamscapes Gates constructs is to be let in a kindling “tautly tuned as a harpsichord’s medieval keys,” and to re-envision chivalry through the elegance of love and creation. “A heart, trills” in sheer delight and awe when we behold the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters and for once “see what others will not” through the voice distinctly Gates’ own.
Anastasia K. Gates is a poet and artist from the Great Appalachian Valley of Pennsylvania. She was shortlisted for the inaugural Oxford Poetry Prize. Her work has been published in Oxford Poetry, Some Kind of Opening, Counterclock Journal, and others. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Columbia University in the City of New York