Kathleen Driskell, poet, essayist, teacher
Kathleen Driskell, poet, essayist, teacher
Award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher Kathleen Driskell has authored of six poetry collections, most recently Goat-Footed Gods (Carnegie Mellon UP). Other collections include Blue Etiquette: Poems, a finalist for the Weatherford Award; Next Door to the Dead, winner of the Judy Gaines Young Book Award; and Seed Across Snow, a Poetry Foundation national bestseller. Her individual poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rattle, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah and other magazines; and her work has been featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry. From 2019-22, she served as chair of the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the professional organization of creative writers and creative writing programs with around 75,000 members. She is professor of creative writing and Chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, where she lives with her husband in an old country church built before the American Civil War.
Distributed for Carnegie Mellon University Press
Goat-Footed Gods
Poems that center on the sinister American cryptid, the Goatman of Pope Lick.
In her sixth collection Goat-Footed Gods, award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher Kathleen Driskell seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of the infamous Goatman of Pope Lick, identified by The Washington Post as one of the deadliest cryptids in America. The Goatman or Pope Lick Monster, a legendary creature long rumored to roam the woods around Driskell’s Kentucky home, is alleged to have caused the deaths of at least five young people at Pope Lick Trestle, a railroad bridge with a ninety-foot drop at its center. The Goatman lyrics are braided with poems about Driskell’s child’s traumatic injury from a fall. Always at the heart of Driskell’s poetry is her insistence that the path to the sacred is found not through the doctrine of ancient gods, but in walking clear-eyed through the dark woods of our historical past and exploring the never-ending wonder of the natural world.
 Creativity & Compassion |  Next Door to the Dead |
|---|---|
 Poems that meditate on light and darkness in the natural world. |  Blue Etiquette |
 Seed Across Snow |  Laughing Sickness |
"The world of Kathleen Driskell’s Goat-Footed Gods is a world of liminal spaces. Driskell’s deft lyrics are a reckoning with andness—the violence and beauty of the American South, the gift and harm of ancestry, the mind caught in the past and the one 'frilled with tomorrows.' Achilles drives dead man’s curve; Pan and Dionysus are teenagers in detention. As these poems attest, the membrane between myth and reality—both surreal, complicated, and strange—is thinner than we think. I'll be returning to this collection again and again to be reminded." ~ Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
"There is magic on hand in Kathleen Driskell's remarkable new collection of poetry. She is tackling huge issues such as history, mythology, parenthood, heartache, and more, yet while her canvas is large, each poem is intimate, haunting, and perfectly constructed. Full of images you will never forget and luxurious language, Goat Footed Gods proves that Kathleen Driskell is one of our best poets." ~ Silas House, author of Lark Ascending and Kentucky State Poet Laureate
"Each poem in this collection is very carefully composed and fully realized—line by line and poem by poem, this is a satisfying book. One of the impressive features is how it works not simply as a collection of poems, but also as a whole book that deepens and expands with each page."
~Maurice Manning, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist The Common Man
"I've always loved Keats's phrase 'the mighty dead,' but I never understood it fully until I read Kathleen Driskell's quietly explosive meditations on life and death. There's a somber beauty to these poems; in them, the dead and living visit each other easily, singing of the rich mysteries on both sides of the divide."
~David Kirby
"Lorca said all art must be suffused with duende or the shadow of death, and for Kathleen Driskell her life is filled with the duende of living next to a graveyard and being reminded every time she looks out her window of that looming end. Children taken too soon, wives, soldiers, and those that are left behind—their stories are at the heart of living. These stark and moving poems give voice to our deepest mystery."
~Barbara Hamby
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