LISTEN to Planet Poet-Words in Space for my conversation with poet Maxima Kahn on her intriguing and deeply felt debut poetry collection Fierce Aria (Finishing Line Press, 2020).
“I have learned to walk into the valley of my fears and losses,” writes Maxima Kahn, and the evidence of what she has learned is all over these amazing poems. Fierce Aria is a book with a post-Wallace Stevens mission: to coax the still perfection of ideas out of the abstract realm, so they can take shape in the messy wilderness of reality. Distinctive, honed, vulnerable, musical, courageous, honest, Maxima Kahn’s poems are fully ripened, fully considered—each one ready to drop richly into the hand like a subtly contoured fruit. Taste them.
–Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems
