Improvisational, speculative, painterly, queer — if My Ida were less free it would be philosophy. What a gorgeous, sovereign poem.

Yes, Simone Kearney has taken on Gertrude Stein’s late great novel about female identity and refusal and has pressured it with possession, the space between bodies that makes the shape of bodies, that makes desire not fickle but determined. It’s aleatory! As such, difficult to say (poetic, emergent) exactly how my/her/my Ida (smoke ring, declarative) forms in and out of formation...It’s so hard to write this blurb! How does one gift wrap a poem that is anti-reification? Like Stein’s Ida, My Ida refuses the winning of defining, the objectificatio n of straight female seduction. MY IDA! persists generously in its offer of winning by way of thin king and desire for every winning one of us.

Simone Kearney's My Ida is a book about adoration. It reminds me that the uncertainty we feel in love can be trapped inside sentences and other items made of language. These fabrications are guilelessly offered back to the world, which is certain to be perplexed by them, as it was by Gertrude Stein's erotic code. Do not be confused: What you hold in your hands is a mirror; it contains the speech of your braver self.