I often tell my students that it’s their experiences outside of and beyond the poetry community that will set their work apart. Kate Bolton Bonnici’s work is a masterclass in looking beyond the literary, and beyond the contemporary, to reveal the strangeness of material culture, femininity, and our lives in language. Bonnici uses archival material–the vestiges of old dictionaries, Aristotle, poetry, fragments, and trial documents–to defamiliarize all that we once thought we knew.
The world that Bonnici creates is best described as a palimpsest, where history is erased, written over, and erased again. What we discover here as readers is a present that is persistently haunted by a specter that we do not yet fully understand, and have not yet fully acknowledged. For Bonnici, it is the willingness to confront the origins of contemporary culture that will ultimately empower her reader. In this gorgeously written essay, Bonnici acts as scholar, curator, teacher, and most importantly, guide.
Kate Bolton Bonnici practiced law in California and Alabama before turning to the study of poetry, rhetoric, and early modern witch beliefs. Kate’s debut collection, Night Burial, won the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her book of creative criticism, A True & Just Record, was published in 2023 by Beyond Criticism Editions at Boiler House Press. Kate’s work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Maine Review, Image, Exemplaria, Arts & Letters, and elsewhere. She is an assistant nonfiction editor at Tupelo Press and an assistant professor of English at Pepperdine University.