Demoted Planet

Mournful and flawless, bereaved and elegant, these breathtaking poems bend low like five widowed giraffes teaching themselves how to go under the limbo bar of grief for the first time. They take the readers into the impeccable sound that a semi makes when it crushes five female nursing students or to a place where you can't ever gaze at the cocktail shrimp or the refrigerator and its forehead the same way. These poems have a way of making you want to wear jeans again after a decade spent with a type of lingerie called khakis. - Vi Khi Nao, judge of the Charlotte Mew Prize We often talk about how our experiences-particularly the difficult ones-leave scars that only grow larger with time, like damage wrought to the trunk of a growing tree. But the poems of Demoted Planet do what I've come to expect from all the poetry of Katherine Fallon: through fantastic imagery, courage, and a touch of humor, they remind us that even the worst of our experiences can be reshaped into something better. -Michael Meyerhofer, author of Ragged Eden With quiet reverence and raw vulnerability, Demoted Planet traces the connective tissue between the before and after of a parent's harrowing illness and passing, revealing how a child, over time, is taught to cope. Katherine Fallon explores a father's complex relationships with his family, his life's work, and the untouchable worlds beyond the realm of his lived experience. These elegiac poems brim over with the aching, often dissonant gaps of memory between the person who raises us and the fragile being they become; the man behind the camera and his ailing body on display. -Nicole Steinberg, author of Glass Actress