Katrina Vandenberg is the author of two collections of poetry, The Alphabet Not Unlike the World and Atlas. Other essays she has published in Orion have been selected as a Notable Essay for the Best American Essays series and won a Pushcart Prize. She directs the creative writing programs at Hamline University and lives with her family in Saint Paul, MN.
Katrina Vandenberg
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On Carrying Our Dead
I. Hello, winter. Hello, earthen path. Drained stone pond. Where is your water? Where are the koi? Hello, snow-shouldered corkscrew pine. Hello, ginkgoes. Hello, hello. After being closed for nearly a Continue reading
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The Age of the Orange
It’s 1434. A merchant and his wife pose for a double portrait. Nearby, four oranges glow from their windowsill. The merchant is an Italian in Flanders, dealing in cloth and tapestries. Continue reading
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On Cold-Weather Vegetables
Gnarled sweet potatoes, tips curling like the feet of witches. Hubbard squashes, big enough to sit on, warty, blue. Mushrooms flaring their gills. Back in July, the tomatoes and corn the Continue reading
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Cherry Season
1. MY MOTHER’S MOTHER kept a set of painted wooden nesting dolls on top of her television. When I was small and went to her house, I would take the set Continue reading
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Essence of Lavender
I mostly keep it bottled away, this three-year period of my life in which I obsessively sucked on breath mints, learned how to remove the smell of rancid almond oil from Continue reading
Review
In Motion
WHEN I RETURNED to the United States after living for a year in the Netherlands, I returned to a gloriously foreign country in Lawrence, Kansas. The slant of light felt exceptionally Continue reading
Poetry
Earthworms
It is raining again this morning, and I am remembering it rained then, too, the summer morning things almost came to be. We lay crosswise on the bed. The curtains grazed Continue reading
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Nails
I haven’t told you yet how haunted I felt when I saw the Harkin store. It stands alone, its wide porch overlooking the Minnesota River, on a deserted stretch of county Continue reading
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Awesome Activism
It’s not your mama’s activism: at noon EST, December 17, 2007, hundreds of young people from all over the U.S. and as far away as Norway, Australia, and Peru simultaneously uploaded Continue reading