katie hartsock

“Hartsock’s exciting collection excels at moving classical figures and mythology into the modern world…”
One of Kirkus Reviews‘ Best Indie Books & Best Poetry Collections of 2023: read the starred review

My second poetry collection Wolf Trees weaves changing ecologies with personal worlds of motherhood and living with Type 1 diabetes: Purchase here through Bookshop, Literati (Ann Arbor), 27th Letter Books (Detroit) Bookends & Beginnings (Evanston, IL), or your favorite bookstore

“Wolf trees are tall mature trees that are not like the other trees—they stand out from their surroundings. The poems in Katie Hartsock’s new collection are as strong, as enduring, as outstanding as the trees from which the book takes its title. These poems are assured, well-rooted but with a light touch even as they address some of the deepest concerns we humans face. Our connections to the world around us are ever rooted in bodies, always leaky, ever changing, flawed and beautiful not despite but in large part because of those openings, those ‘flaws.’ The poems in Wolf Trees are about the becoming that is the human life, and they help us in the journey that is our own becoming.”
— Jim Ferris, author of The Hospital Poems and Slouching Towards Guantanamo

“Katie Hartsock is one wonderful poet. She is the abundantly gifted, skilled and generous keeper of world myths who is constantly cleaning, repairing and representing ancient wisdom to us as new salve and fresh cure for the world as it is right now. Wolf Trees is a gorgeous gathering of poems from one of America’s brightest poetic voices.”
— Lorna Goodison, author of Collected Poems and Supplying Salt and Light

“Expanding from breast milk, stretch marks, and memories of miniskirts to the Farnese Hercules, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and, beautifully, in ‘The Nipple Shield of Achilles,’ to the Iliad, Katie Hartsock’s urgent and capacious poems contain multitudes. In unexpected and compelling ways, many of these poems reach from an intimate focus to the realm of myth and legend. Hartsock’s vision makes her poems ramify like the archetypal tree of her title – shape-shifting, endlessly generative, and radiant with meaning.”
— Rachel Hadas, author of Piece by Piece: Selected Poems and Love and Dread

“The poems in Wolf Trees plait literary and historical anecdotes and allusions and personal histories into a heartbreaking and exuberant vision of the complexities of womanhood. The wolf tree and its natural history emerge as the central conceit of something always seemingly residing alone in its space but standing firm and resilient nonetheless. I have already read Wolf Trees three times; it is one of those rare collections I will continue to visit for inspiration and insight for years to come.”
— Adam Vines, author of Lures and Out of Speech