Honors: Bridget Lowe

The New Yorker is next for this award-winning KC poet.

Maybe it is true what folklore says about red hair—it is the color most likely to adorn poets and madmen.  Bridget Lowe, with her shimmering auburn hair, holds in esteem the inner workings of both.

Perhaps that is why Herbert Leibowitz, publisher and founding editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, describes her work as “uncommonly mature.” “(Her poems) conduct a forensic inquiry into ways to heal the rifts between mind and body, the traumatic wars between our animal and spiritual selves,” he writes.

The 34-year-old poet and Kansas City native is no stranger to accolades.  In 2015, she became the recipient of the Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Her work has also appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and The Best American Poetry series. Last year, she also participated in the Raymond Carver Reading Series in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences. While a student in the MFA program at Syracuse, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and the Peter Neagoe Fiction Award and was chosen from among 900 applicants to receive the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She recently learned that the New Yorker will publish one of her poems this year.

Lowe made her publishing debut with the acclaimed collection “At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky” (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013). The title poem features Nijinsky, a famous Russian ballet dancer, whose heaven-bound leaps were accused of being somehow a trickery of the eyes. Lowe writes of an autopsy where his feet are sliced to find the secret of his amazing abilities, only to conclude he was only human.

“I’m attracted to figures that are both socially celebrated and abruptly abandoned,” says Lowe. “When we try to quantify or ‘make sense’ out of something or someone—we actually obscure the person before us, who is inherently mysterious. We look for ways to assimilate instead of witnessing and allowing for very real differences.”

Many characters for the poetry in this collection came from books found in thrift stores or musty basements, where Lowe’s muse likely resides. “It was at the thrift store where I found the case study called The Wild Boy of Aveyron, and at a yard sale where I found the diaries of Nijinsky. I have been going to the thrift store my whole life, and I am a big believer in its powers to deliver me what I need,” she says.

Lowe is a graduate of Syracuse University’s M.F.A. program and Beloit College, and lives in Kansas City, Mo., where she was born into an artistic and musical family. Her mother, Jean Lowe, is a creative consultant who took St. Louis artist Mary Engelbreit and retailer Nell Hill into national prominence. Her father, Denny Lowe, is a school counselor and musician whose repertoire pays homage to his Irish roots.

Never one to shy away from sharing her poems, Lowe remembers asking her mom to photocopy them for her classmates at her Catholic grade school, where she would pass them around.

“I was kind of obsessed with getting my point of view across and being heard,” Lowe says. “My dad says I have a compulsion to say what other people are thinking but don’t want to say.”

Lowe considers herself a working poet, writing every day and traveling to the occasional university reading, like she did recently at the University of Nevada Las Vegas for the Black Mountain Institute Emerging Writers’ Series. But she also works full-time as manager of content and field marketing for EPR Properties in Kansas City.

She’s working on a second book of poetry and busy planning a wedding in the spring of 2016 to fellow poet Peter Mishler.

Wretches

In the lamplight afforded us
by a generous donor who wished
to remain anonymous, we sat
in the front row, eager to see
the hand come down and hover over
the infant flesh, squeeze
the doughy knees. Please, we asked,
press the palm lightly
against the forehead, in a promise
that all the future wounds
will have some modicum of purpose.
Just ask, they said, and it will be.
The soul is a gob in your chest.
Be brave and touch it. Oh,
oh, what mess. What thick discharge
from the eyes. I once was blind
and then I got blinder
and then—then—I could see.

First published by the Poetry Society of America