What people are saying about In the Company of Words:
“Closely watched scenes; ringing shifts, gaps; breathtaking progressions, appear in and make up Gregory Kiewiet’s remarkable collection. This book reverberates. It beautifully provokes, moves, even unsettles.” Lynn Crawford
“To seek the company of words is to cultivate the silence in which language speaks. It is as much a matter of listening as of writing, and a willingness to think with words as they exist. In their wry compassion for “a world that needs no introduction” and their fierce humility in the face of its “barbed wire hang-ups,” these poems compel and reward our attention.” Ted Pearson
“There are brilliant traceries in these structures – the poem as filament, the poem as grid. Within them a keen interplay between the abstract and the pointedly concrete. Much of the work of language here goes on in the synapse, in the gap between losses, distances, political “things” at work, climates and unnamed cultural weather, the sudden detail, tatters of conversation, something overheard . . . these themes or movements carried through in an impressive variety of forms and approaches: at first this variety is disarming, but the altercations between stripped and scattered structures and established devices, between the word-driven lyric and something like the memory narrative (done ever so lightly), between translations and poems conceived by the author in Dutch and rendered then into English, becomes at last, by a kind of wonderful accetion, an intriguing and appealing collection, something to be picked up and carried around.” Edward Haworth Hoeppner
Gregory Kiewiet recieved his B. A. in English and Art History from Oakland University (Rochester, MI) and M. A. in English (Creative Writing) from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI) – he is currently pursueing an MFA in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Previous work has appeared in http://www.markszine.com/ Dispatch Detroit, Graffiti Rag, Woodward Magazine, and Box.
