“Diffusely Yours” by Kate Garklavs Suggests We Are All Connected on an Atomic Level

In the chapbook Diffusely Yours by Kate Garklavs (Bottlecap Press, 2018) each poem is a letter to a person or institution. These poem-letters are playful, absurd and full of private meaning.

The speaker diffuses bits of herself and her very visceral memories to a friend, lover or regular haunt, but it also clear she has absorbed parts of these people and places into herself as well. Indeed, the collection opens with a poem FROM a Goodwill, which is a perspective I’d never imagined correspondence from before.

A decades-long friendship is celebrated in “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,” recalling scenes like:

Do ​you remember going public braless? I can’t
but I can’t undo the truth of flesh-and-blood photographs.
Rip them and the smallest shreds contain atoms of the youth.

Intimate recollections like this suggest that the speaker’s life has fused with the people in it on the atomic level.

“Diffusely Yours” is a work about locations and personal memories, but also the speaker’s own body. Again from “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,”

Spider
veins remind me of heaven and they’re reality now
that I’m 30, joke age turned real.

These poems witness a changing and aging body, and yet the intellectual or emotional connections made along the way remain constant.

The memories shared throughout this chapbook could come across as inside jokes that most readers are on the outside of. But the language is so sharp that the specifics illuminated actually point to broader, even universal, truths.

I think my favorite in this collection is “Letter to a Wife from an Almost-Wife,” in the voice of a guest at the wedding of an ex. The speaker is sloppy but still elated.

We will always need mothers
because we can’t sew zippers ourselves, will
always love thrifting for the romantic salvage
& rescue vibes. I’m writing on your two-thirds
anniversary because every month needs fresh
champagne.

“Romantic salvage” is an intriguing turn of phrase and, I would argue, the nucleus of the project that is Diffusely Yours.

Kate Garklavs lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work has appeared in Juked, apt, Leveler, Tammy, and The Airgonaut, among other places. She’s the prose editor for the Submission reading series. She tweets @ueberkatester.

 

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.